She didn’t know I was seated at the desk behind the barrier when she started to mock a council member from one of the towns she covers, someone she had just written a story about.
This came in reaction to his calling her to thank her for the write up.
When she hung up, she mockingly laughed about the man telling one of the other women that the council member actually believed she cared if he lived or died.
He (the council member) was running against the mayor of the town, someone whom she sometimes seemed aligned to, although she has sometimes said disparaging things about the mayor as well.
I was seated behind a barrier trying to recover photos from one of the computer servers, an unusual place for me to be, which is why she did not detect me.
I don’t know why her talk bothered me, but clearly, she was trying to humiliate the man she had interviewed, making him look foolish in the eyes of one of the other office people.
This suggested that if she did this to him, she is capable of doing the same thing about anybody, including me.
This conversation painted her as more ruthless and gave new meaning to the “clawing” she possibly meant in her recently posted poem.
When I first read the poem, I didn’t take it personally – except as me being part of a crowd. But listening to her and reading the poem again, I get the idea that perhaps it was more directly aimed at me, “Their stares shooting” through her aligned with an accusation she made about my staring at her at work. And the whole end of the poem playing off the concept of stalking, “if you don’t look back, maybe they aren’t really there, but they are.”
The idea that “they” would take away what she clawed to take in the first place seems more ruthless after the conversation than I thought when reading the poem for the first time.
“He liked what I wrote,” she told her female coworker, “even the part about his once being a male stripper.”
And laughing, she went on, “So much for my needing these stories to make myself popular.”
This last was perhaps an allusion to one of my poems, making me suspect how obsessed she might be about things I’ve said or written.
She had meant her story about the councilmember to be demeaning, perhaps to counter a more positive column I had written about him, and she found it humorous that he did not realize just how demeaning a story it was.
This scared me a little. I had not until that moment realized just how intentional at times her viciousness could be.
She and her co-worker were still laughing about it as they made their way down the stairs, and I hurriedly eased out from where I sat to get back to the place where I was expected to be sitting. The last thing I needed was to be caught ease dropping. More evidence in her case against me, I suppose.
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