The Lemon Life | online magazine offering a fresh perspective on post-grad life.

Words by: Virginia Manning

Image by: Hugo Arias

It was the end of a long Friday, after a disastrous week at the job I was about to lose anyway—they fired me a week later.  Having maxed out my ability to stay awake and my well of tears, I was on my last shred of energy. It was dark, well past the five o’clock. With burning eyes and paper-cut fingers, I turned off my computer and put it in my bag. I hoped I wouldn’t fall asleep on the bus and miss my stop.
On my way out the corridor past the lunchroom, my supervisor (one of my 7 bosses) called me over.  At a whole three years older than me, she considered herself to have had infinitely more life knowledge than me, and was quick to express her superiority with her most professional baby voice. She fancied herself a PR genius because she was friendly with the silky pharmaceutical reps. She was a poor leader, and disorganized, and it was hard not to notice her short skirts and low-cut tops during client meetings.  But I felt sorry for her because she terrible teeth, which were a collection of browning chunks that looked as though they were framed with sandpaper.  She seemed to have dental appointments weekly, and occasionally wore retainers during the day. She had a brief couple of weeks wearing braces, but had later come back to the office brace-less and with her teeth looking more rickety than ever. Although she showed me nothing but cattiness and nastiness, I always had sympathy for her. It must have been tough to have those teeth.
When she called my name, a stream of stress crept up my back and my shoulders tensed. I considered ignoring her, but I naively thought there was still hope of keeping my job. I turned around and followed her to the conference room. My coat on and my laptop bag heavy on my shoulder, I was sweating already. It was compounded with worry over what she was going to ask of me. Telling me that I needed to stay in the office until midnight was not out of the realm of possibility. But when I sat down, she glared at me with a wide, phony, yellow-toothed smile. Her disgusting rack of teeth was all I could see, and when she talked, her incisors seemed to wobble. She started to talk to me about my future, my abilities, and how she recognized a lot of herself in me. I recoiled. This was perhaps the worst insult I had ever received.
I lost track of what she was saying. The conversation confused me. I had deduced that she knew I was on the fast track to getting fired with the impending merger, and I was disinterested in a life lesson from someone for whom I had no respect but I could not work out why she was giving me a counseling session. Not even a glimmer of friendship existed between us. She rambled on.
In the midst of a sentence that she probably thought was profound, something awful happened. Her shaky incisor freed itself from her mouth and fell onto the conference table. In slow motion, it slid across the wood, fell off the edge onto the wooden seat of a chair before finally landing on the floor on the opposite side of the table. My eyes have never been wider, and my mouth hung open. She was silent for long enough that the situation became a touch more awkward. Covering her hand with her mouth, she ran to the tooth, saying in a muffled voice how she had hoped that would not happen. I had temporarily forgotten how to speak, and my expression did not change.  Keeping her hand over her mouth, she waited for me to respond, but I could not. She removed her hand, and then tried to put the rogue tooth back into the gap it had left behind.
I considered this conversation to be over, and shuddering, I picked up my bag, and left the conference room.

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