In six minutes, Ms. Maggie Butler could go up to the machine and stamp her time-sheet. For the two-thousand one-hundred and thirteenth day, it would register, in smudgy red ink, “overtime.” 7:16 PM. Technically, she was allowed to leave at five every day, but she couldn’t think of much else to do anyhow. Restaurants were expensive and filled with drunkards, clubs were loud, and she couldn’t stand the new, “liberated” style of dance popular among young women. What would her mother say if she knew that her little girl, who was supposed to be proving herself in the big city, was dancing, shaking her hips and lifting her skirts? The bookshelves would always keep her company. At least they were filled with world history, classic literature, overly-optimistic guides to “Making it in This New Roaring Economy” — unlike the fluff-filled gossip-sections of the local papers in the kiosk on the corner, promising to “Spill the Latest Styles,” “Release Your Inner Free Woman” “Make Sure He Likes It.” Above the kiosk stood a tall billboard advertising the newest home appliances: apparently they were more accessible than ever with a “instant, risk-free plan” to buy them on credit. She guessed the pride she held in her ability to get out any stain, cook any meal, and keep any home clean by herself wouldn’t earn her much respect in this new era, where it seemed that appliances did more work around the house than did wives. She’d waited twenty six years to find a man for whom to have dinner on the table by five for. Today, it seemed any man would be happier if, at five, she were dressed in a knee-length skirt to help him polish off a glass or two.

 

She was a bookkeeper for a Charles Willis, a rich twenty-nine-year-old owner of a real-estate firm taking advantage of the housing bubble who was, as far as she was concerned, illiterate. Last week, he asked her if Jack London was the “Great Expectations guy.” For someone with a book-collection that just might have rivaled his massive ego in size, her boss had made it clear he cared more about the new dance “The Black Bottom” than about preserving the knowledge that mere decades ago had seemed vital. She heard him call her name from his office and sighed as she stood up from her desk chair. It was on grey, Tuesday evenings like this that she felt she had the most useless job in the world.

 

Mr.Willis’ voice carried across his large office: “Yes, order them by last name, absolutely. Oh, and don’t bother sorting the Classics — we’ll be getting rid of them anyhow.”

 

“Getting rid of them‽ You mean, throwing them away? Or just reshelving them in another office?” Maggie replied, surprised and confused.

 

“Oh no, I can’t imagine keeping these in the building any longer than we already have. I just ordered new vacuum cleaners for the custodial staff. I’ve heard they make cleaning so easy, even a man could do it. Books produce dust. Last thing we need around here is a thousand pounds of them. No modern business ever got anywhere by staring at the two-hundred-year-old words of some old pretentious ass. I’m sure there’s one of those Salvation Army places around here that accepts donations if that makes you feel any better. Give them away or add them to that strange little collection of yours.  Worst case scenario, the boxes go on the curb. Now I’d like you to be out of here by eight: I’ll be going out tonight, and if I bring any woman back to show her my workplace, I’d prefer you be absent.” said Mr.Willis.

 

The bookshelves in Mr. Charles Willis’ office were seven feet, four inches tall. Maggie Butler stood five feet three inches, from the top of her mousy, lopsided bun to the thick soles of her outdated brown Oxfords. If she stood on tiptoe, her outstretched arm reached just short of the top shelf of the latest editions of Encyclopedia Britannica. Ms. Butler was part of that rare set of people who maintained their agendas daily and continued to carry old love notes and family photos in her change purse. Now, her right hand also held her time card, covered with large red “Overtime” stamps.

 

She left the tall office building and set off down the street. It had been a long, difficult day and her large carpet bag was weighed down by the unwanted words of Shakespeare and Dickens.

She always told people she met that her flat, where she unfortunately lived alone, was her hideaway: her reading alcove. In her descriptions, she painted a picture of a bright, sunny apartment stacked floor to ceiling with with beautiful, seemingly untouched editions of the world’s greatest writings, like flawless paper bricks in her literary castle of knowledge. Somehow she always expected, every time she trudged the blocks from the evening bus to Cropsey Boulevard (passing at least several wobbling, drunk men just struggling to stay on their feet,) to see just that as she opened her dull grey door.

 

She tossed her keys on the coffee table, nearly tripping over her cat’s hair-covered plaything and surveyed the few teetering bookcases. They were piled with dog-eared, battered paperback worlds with cracked spines that showed the attrition from every one of the dozens of times she’d sank down onto her couch and begged for the faraway lands and the handsome nobles and the strong, gorgeous heroines to take her away someplace, any place that wasn’t here. Any place where she wasn’t Ms. Butler the Bookkeeper for the thirty-year-old millionaire who probably thought Hemingway wrote Don Quixote. Any place that wasn’t this horrible, degenerate, lost city of crass and sass and no respect or virtue.

She’d always dreamed of moving to the big city. After the war, it seemed everyone had flocked to experience urban life for themselves. Her rural neighbours had all been worried, but she hadn’t seen why. The glittery, modern, urban lifestyle seemed so unfamiliar, yet so attractive. She couldn’t wait to make her own twenties, well, just as roaring as the 20’s of the century. The economy was booming, everyone seemed to be able to afford everything in the world. There would never be war again, and she just couldn’t wait to show off who Maggie Butler was to the world. Sure, the cities were different, filled with immigrants and stockbrokers and Communists and Socialists and flappers, but she’d find her place among them all, in the glamour and glitz, somehow, or so she’d hoped.

Thank goodness she’d brought home two new books. The others were getting far too familiar, too memorized. When her mind finished the author’s sentences, she was, for a moment, forced to remember that these worlds weren’t real.

 

She took off her blazer and, after draping it over the back of a chair, half-heartedly began to sift through the stack of mail on the dining table, tossing envelopes of various shades of white into messy piles. Dull letters from the insurance company, bills that she had the money but not the energy to pay, catalogues from that new  appliance store addressed to “the independent woman,” who’d rather go dancing than do dishes. A cheery card with her mother’s handwriting told her about the delicious homemade preserves she was missing out on, and asked her about that nonexistent “handsome young lad” she said she’d come to fancy. She wondered why she even bothered feeling disappointed. What did she expect? A bulky envelope with a letter from a faraway pen pal? A romantic card from a handsome stranger professing his undying love? Anything worth keeping and rereading on a rainy Sunday? Not like that would ever happen. Only in a book, maybe.

 

Her life was just about as far away from being packaged into 312 pages of 10pt. Serif font between two smooth, pretty covers as it could get. Reading a good book cover to cover took her somewhere far, far away; a day of her life from the moment she kicked off her covers to the time she got back under them solely filled her with an inexplicable, intangible heaviness that somehow made it very clear that she would be waking up in the same bed, in the same place, for the same job for a very long time. Not where she wanted to be, but probably where she was supposed to be.

 

The utopia she’d imagined the city to be couldn’t last forever. The 20’s went on, the social events became wilder, morals became looser, and the liquor became cheaper. Everyone she knew had a tendency of having “just a little too much to drink” just a little too often. The youth of the city seemed to burn out and harden at ever decreasing age. No-one believed in true love or restraint anymore. Spend the money, pour the drinks, and spend the night with a new stranger every Friday. It wasn’t as if she saw her friends becoming depressed, sick-looking. Maybe she was even beginning to suspect that they couldn’t live without the liquor they loved so dearly. Who cares. There was no place in this big city for an old-fashioned rural Belle.

 

If she was going to live a life of boredom, she might as well live it with a cup of hot tea Besides, the idea of heading off to a local coffee shop to work on Her Novel was just cliche enough to be embarrassingly appealing. It was the sort of thing she would love to say she was doing  to a friend who happened to call. Someday it would happen; someone would decide to see what she was up to at a time when she wasn’t standing in the aisle of the local grocery store, staring at the shelf and comparing three kinds of canned beans. Exactly what Her Novel was was hard to say. It wasn’t what one would call written, or even really “being written” for that matter. It was a few scratched-out false starts on a yellow legal pad that in her mind was a beautifully bound, strokable, well-titled published book about something.

 

Twenty minutes, five dollars, and a quarter of a sweetened cappuccino later, the number of scrapped grand beginnings on the first pages of her favourite notebook had increased by two. Maybe the coffee was too strong, or the jazz was too loud, or it was just too much of a Tuesday. Either way, today clearly wasn’t the day she would turn into Ernest Hemingway or Jane Austen. Why couldn’t her writing ever quite do what she wished it could? No one reading her story would ever suddenly find themselves to be the rebellious, adventure-craving young duchess of strict parents, clutching her long skirts as she ran down a forest path, turning to look back, quite cinematically, every so often. The chirping of dozens of birds and insects she would never know the names of wouldn’t fill their ears, and they would never feel the surprise of running straight into the tall, well-dressed stranger with an accent from somewhere Maggie Butler never been, with perfect hair, and pants of a fashionable level of tightness for the time, a phenomenon she had yet to witness.

 

Feeling quite hopeless about her chances of suddenly blossoming into the writer she wished she were, she played with her coffee cup, moving the eraser of her pencil in circles just inside the rim. Moments later, coffee rushed across the top of the table, heading straight for the piles of notes of her table mate- a middle-aged stockbroker clearly engrossed in reading the paper. Before she had a chance to think, a stream of indistinct “oh my god, I’m so sorry’s” came from her mouth as she tried to push papers away from the spreading brown liquid.

Were this scene occurring in the pages of one of the books she ran away to, perhaps the handsome man would stand up, take her hand, say “screw the  coffee, screw the books” and whisk her off on a grand adventure. Maybe she’d end her day sipping whiskey on a fifth floor fire escape, or maybe he’d just turn around and say “Hello, beautiful woman.” But, this wasn’t page 45 of The Bookkeeper’s Escapade; it was just Tuesday, October twenty third in the life of a dinosaur with brown Oxford shoes and a half-empty blue notebook. The man swept up his papers, grabbed his hat and briefcase, and mumbled “God, some people” as he moved to another table across the cafe. The coffee grinder whirred, the smooth jazz played and the couple in the corner went on chatting. The dark coffee seeped into the pages of Maggie Butler’s notebook, making the edges stained and soggy, and she realized that in her book, whose pages pages were as white as the newest refrigerators and envelopes from the credit company, nothing would ever happen.