Her mind goes briefly to the sink, where her dirty dishes lay unattended for the past two days. She wouldn't have cared but her roommate needs some of the things and he doesn't always succeed to avoid giving her a hard time. Her mind is already looking at the dishes. It wouldn't take her very long to wash them. But then her body is doing something else. Her hand is already holding her cell phone, her fingers already typing the number that she manages to get her distracted mind to recall the owner of. The spelling of this person's name. Someone important, more important, suddenly than the dishes, the pots, the chopsticks, the knife. How old is the crud on that knife? But her mind stops there and takes a detour, a long detour, to the person she feels she must call now. There isn't a moment when she isn't talking on the phone, talking to a guest, talking on the computer, or writing emails, except when she is working. To actually find the time for her surroundings, whether it's other people or the dishes seems quite difficult.
The phone at the other end starts to ring, and in that moment hearing the humming of the first ring, her mind falls momentarily back on the dishes track. She gets up from her seat. When did she sit back down again. When she first thought about the dishes, she was standing, holding the phone, looking at the screen as her finger scrolls through the list of names to find the one she's looking for. She was typing in the approximate spelling of the person's name, but she was having trouble because her mind back then was momentarily looking at the dishes in the kitchen. She was standing. But now, somehow, she finds herself sitting in front of the computer.
She should at least take a look at the sink, to see how things are. She gets up, and while doing so the person on the other end picks up. "Hi, this is Mary calling. Is Jane there?" She half expects the answer from the other side and so her mind is already half-made up on a response. The other end is quiet for a while until Jane's voice is heard. Now she is walking through the dining room and by the time she starts her friendly, warm greeting with Jane, she was already in the kitchen. She opens the fridge door as she tells Jane the business of canceling the meeting they were supposed to be going to soon, but because of the snow....
Now she has in her other hand a bag of potato chips. But wasn't she opening the door to the fridge? She isn't sure. She is now too focused on the conversation. There is a lot of planning now that the original plan has been changed by what was so foreseeable by everyone who had a TV or internet access. She uses her right ear and right shoulder to squeeze the phone while she can free up her hands to rip open the bag of chips.
"I will call Tom now and see what he thinks about our plan. Oh, and how are the kittens?" She needs to chitchat, to not make it sound 100% business. The kittens seem fine, newly adopted and happy in a new home away from a fate they would never have the misfortune to know because Jane is such a wonderful person. That's what she is thinking before she realized she was dialing Tom's number while taking out a salsa dip. The fridge, her level at least, is not so full and half the stuff is molding or gone bad. "That smell...." It's her long expired milk. But she doesn't notice. The smell is just another bad smell and her natural reaction is to close the fridge door.
Again, squeezing the phone between her right ear and right shoulder, she greets Tom while trying to wring open the lid. "It's Mary calling. Hey Tom. Sorry to call you so late...." Is it really late? She just says that all the time because most of the time she does call people late, completely oblivious of the hour of making such calls. It is a running joke behind her back that she likes to apologize so she could transgress common decency rules.
Why doesn't the lid just come off?
She's increasingly getting distracted by the frustration over the unopenable jar of salsa for her chips. Tom isn't very happy; not only is she calling late (it is actually very late for a father of a one-year old boy), but also because the change in the plan would almost certainly mean that he can't make the meeting, which he wanted to make some points in. She tries to be understanding but also tries to make him understand, but as she tries harder and becomes more frustrated with the jar, she eventually can't pay attention anymore. She usually talks a lot, never ending, until the other person, either through her success of making him understand or simply gets tired of listening to her droning, would comply with whatever she wants them to comply or even feel. But now she isn't talking much.
Why doesn't this darn jar just budge!
"Hold on a moment Tom, just hold on please! Thank you," she says then puts the phone down. she walks to get a dry towel, and on her way back, she notices the sinkfull of her dishes, pans, a knife, and a lot of bowls. She picks up the phone again, and as soon as she says "hello" Tom tells her that he can't talk more but that he doesn't like the idea. And before she could try to convince him to listen on, he apologized and insisted that he got back to his son who started crying.
Silence. It was her and the jar whose lid seemed married to the jar of food that is needed for her to eat the chips. In her mind, she wants to break the jar open, with a hammer if she must. In her mind, there's also the dishes, the bowls, the knives, and everything else not normally in her mind, everything else neglected.
She puts down the jar next to the bag of chips, and walks towards the dishes that are bracing themselves for a long sought after shower of cleanliness. But half way through, her mind finds a name and her fingers already started going through the address list.
