THREE RIVERS BY BRYAN YURCAN

October, 2004

          Wednesday was an especially foggy day in Pittsburgh, which dampened the mood of everyone in the office. At 1:15, her break ended. She walked outside of the break room, which featured four vending machines. One of them, a coffee machine, hadn’t worked for three months.

          “Gretta,” someone called out to her, “I’ve been watching the hands move on my watch. I think they’re moving backward.”

          She found it best to ignore her co-workers. They weren’t mean-spirited or dull; she just couldn’t understand them. Not to use the word ‘understand’ to signify some deep meaning, like when a man about to divorce his wife tells her he can’t understand her anymore. No, she simply couldn’t understand them the way she couldn’t understand Chinese or the fuss her sister-in law made over the gay men who fixed up people’s apartments on TV.

          Gretta worked for a major credit card company. The building was located right downtown, in the heart of the city. She collected people’s bill payments and credited their accounts accordingly. She was surprised at how many of them sent in only the minimum payment even when their balance was thousands of dollars. She always paid the majority of the balance on her bills if it was financially possible.

          Gretta was not German; although people thought she might be due to her first name. Whenever she revealed her last name, a very un-German sounding name, it was apparent she had no Teutonic blood in her. She didn’t look German either; she had olive colored skin and short black hair and could have passed for Italian or Greek. Although she didn’t know it, Gretta was named after a lover her father had when he was in his early 20’s. He never stopped yearning for her, even when he was married to Gretta’s mother, and insisted on choosing their daughter’s name when the time came. Of course, Gretta’s mother had no knowledge of this previous lover. When her husband decided on “Gretta” he simply told his wife he wanted the name because it reminded him of a fairy tale he used to read as a child.

          The largest balance she had ever encountered during her time at work for the major credit card company was for am man in debt close to $70,000. Naturally, he only paid the minimum on it. His name was William Aretakis. She remembered because she wrote it down on a piece of paper and left it on her nightstand. If she encountered a person with a larger debt than that, his name would replace Mr. Aretakis’ on the nightstand. He would be the new record holder.

          She wondered why the man had run up such a high debt on his credit card. Gretta imagined he was a helpless gambler who kept taking out cash advances on his card to pay off his bookies. She imagined him placing down a large sum of money at the track on a can’t-miss horse and then watching the horse pull up lame after the second turn. She tried to picture the look on his face, and how he would walk wordlessly from the track to the nearest convenience store to buy a twelve pack of beer and drink himself to sleep that night. She hadn’t decided if he would be sobbing as he fell asleep.

          Gretta was in her mid-thirties and many of her fellow employees thought she had been in her mid-thirties all her life.

          “I can’t picture her being seventeen,” said Andrea Kramer, the office gossip, one day during the previous year.

          “I know,” replied Ed Grant, one of the IT guys. He was agreeing with Andrea because he wanted to sleep with her, and was working his way up to asking her out.

          “I can’t even picture her being old, only the way she looks now,” Andrea said.

          “I know.”

          Ed would eventually end up sleeping with her two months after that conversation. After Andrea’s boyfriend had found out about it, he tracked Ed down and waited outside his apartment. Ed got the worst of the fight, suffering a black eye and a broken nose. However, he wasn’t bothered at all. He had longed all his life to be in a fight, a real fight, and went to bed with a smile that night.

          Gretta rarely stayed at work later than she had to be. The company offered overtime pay, as long as it was approved by a manager, which it usually was. The managers were very concerned with keeping up productivity and didn’t mind paying the employees a few extra dollars if it meant getting more work done. Most of the workers did stay late for the extra money. Gretta didn’t need to. She had no one dependent on her financially. She was awash with disposable income.

          Her apartment was on the outskirts of the city, in a tall building on Norton St.. People in Pittsburgh were big into football and the Pittsburgh Steelers. She cheered for the Steelers too, and often went down to the bar on the corner to watch the games with the men who shouted at the television and referred to themselves as part of the team.

          “We scored a touchdown,” or “We did good today,” they would say.

          Her apartment was sparsely decorated. The kitchen consisted of a small table with three chairs, all of which were rarely in use at the same time. The appliances were all very old; in fact the refrigerator dated from the time her parents were first married. They handed it down to her when she first moved out of the house at 23 and she never saw a need to replace it. It worked fine, and she liked to listen to the humming sound it made as she fell asleep in her bedroom, which was adjacent to the kitchen.

          Her bedroom didn’t have any decorations except for a small reprint of a painting of the San Francisco skyline. She bought it at a gift shop near Fisherman’s Wharf when she was on vacation there seven years ago. She was visiting a cousin who worked as an economics professor at Berkeley. The two were close as children, but had talked only sparingly as adults. Gretta had only spoken to her cousin twice since her trip to San Francisco. The last Gretta heard from her, she was in the middle of a divorce from her husband of four years.

          The living room was small, with an old plaid couch resting in front of a television set. In between them sat a coffee table with a year old copy of The New Yorker, a mystery novel she heard about on a talk show where the author was being interviewed, and the previous day’s edition of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The top news story was about the shooting death of a 27-year old man.

          Gretta put a pot of water to boil on the stove. She was going to cook lobster tails she had purchased at the A&P down the street for dinner. She had forgotten to purchase a lemon on the way home from work.

          She went to bed shortly after 9:30 after listening to part of a James Taylor record given to her as a birthday present from her sister-in law. She fell asleep to the hum of the refrigerator and the sounds of cars driving by on the street below.

          “Good morning to you all,” her boss said the next day as he passed the row of cubicles where Gretta sat.

          Mr. Beck was not a particularly bad person, nor was he much of a condescending boss. Gretta just thought he was utterly devoid of character. She couldn’t picture him having a home life or a family. She imagined he spent all his time in his office.

          That day, a strange surprise awaited her as she performed her job. A man with a $100 debt on his card had mailed in his bill, and surprisingly paid off the whole amount. However, as she was about the throw the envelope in the trash she noticed there was something else in it besides the bill. It was a picture. A picture of a man, she guessed around thirty, with short black hair and glasses. He was a portly man judging from the roundness of his face. He wore thick-framed glasses and looked straight ahead, as if he were looking at something behind the person taking his picture.

          She looked at the bill. It was sent by a Mr. Joel Stellman of 462 Woodlawn Dr. Wilmington, DE 19802.

          Was this a picture of him, she thought? In her seven years at the job she had never seen anyone send in anything else with his or her bill, much less a picture.

          She examined the picture some more. She thought Mr. Stellman looked like the most naïve man in the world. She conjured up images of him being ripped off by street vendors in places like Manhattan or Los Angeles. She instantly felt a deep compassion for him. Mr. Stellman surely had suffered a great amount of hardships, no doubt brought upon by people in the world who were in a more powerful position than he was. Gretta decided he was a clerk of some sort. Definitely a grocery store clerk.

          “What’re you looking at?” asked Judy, the woman who sat in the next cubicle over as she walked by from getting a cup of coffee. Gretta didn’t answer.

          “Is that your boyfriend?” Judy asked. “He’s very handsome.”

          Some people have said that the office environment is more gossipy than high school. They were wrong, Gretta thought. It was much worse.

          The picture of Joel Stellman was taped to the wall in her cubicle by the next day. None of her co-workers further inquired about it, although she did notice people glance when they came into her cubicle. Her boss had stared at the picture for a long time when he came around to her desk to give his daily pep talk.

          Mr. Beck liked to give his pep talks in the morning to the employees at the office. He couldn’t talk to them all on any given day, so he split them up into different groups that he talked to on certain days. Gretta’s group got the talk on Tuesdays.

          His speeches were usually variations on the same theme: what each individual employee brings to the table, an expression he liked, is as important as anything else. Mr. Beck liked to reaffirm his employees that their individuality and creativity were essential to doing their jobs better. Those who liked to “think outside the box,” he would say, were destined for great things.

          As he finished talking to Gretta, he took a final glance at the picture and opened his mouth, then closed it quickly. Gretta thought he was going to ask her about it, she was glad he didn’t. She didn’t know what she would have said about the picture. She would have probably told him it was a picture of her brother.

          During the next two weeks, she would stare at length at the picture hanging on her wall before beginning to work. She wondered if Joel Stellman had made any more purchases on his credit card. She hoped he would never have any trouble paying off his debt. Gretta thought that if she owned the company, she would erase any balance that Mr. Stellman might owe on his card and let him start over.

          A new employee had joined the company and sat near Gretta. His name was Brad. He was in his early thirties and was friendly to everyone. Brad didn’t generate the enthusiasm from people that he showed to them, but the other employees liked him well enough and didn’t have anything bad to say.

          Gretta had spoken to him a few times and found him to be very pleasant. Brad seemed eager to at least be on speaking terms with everyone who worked near him.

          “Did you see that Steelers game last night?” he asked her on a Tuesday morning, a night after they had defeated the Indianapolis Colts. Brad surmised she was a fan of the team when he noticed a miniature plastic replica helmet sitting on her desk.

          “I did,” she replied. “I forced myself to stay up and watch it.”

          Brad was a plain looking man, she thought. He had blonde, curly hair and a clean-shaven face and always wore a white shirt to work. The color of his tie would vary from blue to black on any given day.

          “One day, a bunch of us from the office should get together and watch a game.”

          “Yes, that would be fun,” Gretta said. She didn’t relish the opportunity to see her co- workers outside the office, but she wouldn’t decline the offer out of fear of coming off like a loner.

          She enjoyed talking to Brad quite a bit. Gretta didn’t find him terribly interesting, but he was nice and that was worth something. However, most of her days were spent thinking about the next payment Joel Stellman would send in. His next one was due again shortly. Would he send in another picture? Would he send along another personal item along with his bill? Gretta was very anxious to find out.

          The next day Brad asked her about the picture. She thought he would have brought it up sooner. Gretta knew he would eventually ask her about it, but was dreading the day. Brad asked everyone about pictures they had on their desks.

          “It’s a picture of my cousin,” she told him. She dropped her original lie, that it was a picture of her brother, after she realized she once told Shirley Feinstein that she had only one sibling, a sister.

          As work was ending that day, Brad asked his local group of cubicle-mates to go out to happy hour at the local theme chain restaurant that was located in the lobby of the building they worked in. Gretta accepted the invitation without really knowing why. To her best recollection, they had never gone out as a group before.

          When they got there, a pretty young blonde woman whom Gretta thought looked no older than 16 offered them a drink.

          “Would anyone like a margarita?”

          “I’ll take two, its been a long day,” said Shirley Feinstein as everyone at the table laughed uproariously. Gretta found it hard to feign laughter when something wasn’t funny.

          “No, seriously I’ll just take one,” Shirley said after the laughter died down. Gretta noticed the waitress roll her eyes when Shirley wasn’t looking.

          Everyone else followed suit and ordered a margarita. When the drinks came Brad lifted his glass into the air.

          “To us, the working stiffs of the world,” he said as they clinked glasses.

          Besides herself, Brad, and Shirley, there were two other people that came who Gretta really didn’t know.

          After several drinks, the conversation turned from politics to sports to everyone’s love life. It was a subject Gretta didn’t enjoy talking about.

          After a few of them shared stories, Brad looked at her and smiled.

          “So, Gretta, are you seeing anyone right now?”

          She replied that she wasn’t.

          “Keeping your options open, huh? That’s the way to do it. Who wants to be tied down anyway?”

          “Although sometimes I like to be tied up,” Shirley said, her comment again resulting in much laughter. “But seriously, though, I’m just kidding.”

          On the third of the next month, Mr. Stellman’s credit card payment came in and miraculously ended up in Gretta’s stack of bills to be processed.

          She held the envelope in her hand for a few moments before opening it. She noticed his handwriting on the envelope was remarkably neat. She hardly ever saw a man’s handwriting be so clean and precise. She pictured him sitting at his kitchen table right before going to bed, meticulously writing each perfect letter of the address on the outside of the envelope.

          When she finally opened the bill, Gretta saw that Stellman had once again paid off his balance in full. It was only twenty dollars. Gretta knew he was not the kind of person to let his credit card debt run very high.

          To her delight, another picture was enclosed along with his bill payment. It looked very much like the previous one that was sent. She couldn’t tell if it was a copy of the same picture or a new one. She compared it to the picture hanging in her cubicle. He was wearing the same shirt and his smile looked identical in both photos. Upon closer inspection she realized the background was white in the new picture. In the previous one it was blue. So it is a new picture after all, she thought.

          Gretta wondered what would inspire someone to send a photo of themselves along with a credit card payment. Maybe he was tired of living in such an impersonalized world. She didn’t like modern society, one where people could take money out of the bank, purchase a car, and even buy groceries without having to speak to anyone face to face. Gretta often lamented what she called “the computerization of society” even though she didn’t know exactly what that meant.

          Gretta took down the old photo and placed it in the top drawer of her desk. She put the new one up in its place. Gretta gazed at the picture for several minutes before returning to work. Sporadically throughout the day she glanced over at it.

          For the next two weeks she pondered whether she should send Mr. Stellman a letter. Gretta had brought home the original picture and taped it to her refrigerator. The second one was still displayed in her cubicle.

          “Gretta, you’re productivity has gone a little down recently,” Mr. Beck said to her the next morning. As he spoke he looked past her, as if staring at something in the distant horizon.

          “It’s not a big concern,” he went on. “You’ve been a loyal worker here for many years.” He took a sip from his coffee mug. “Is there anything bothering you at home?” he asked.

          No, there wasn’t, she told him. Mr. Beck was probably unaware that she didn’t have much of a home life to speak of.

          “Well, just keep on working hard then,” he said, “I’m sure you’ll be back to your normal self.”

          Gretta didn’t think her work had been lagging, but she may have been spending too much time preoccupied with the pictures. She decided to not think about them at work until the next one arrived.

          When she was home, however, she was unable to not think about it. Many nights, Gretta had sat up on her kitchen table and composed the first few lines of a letter she would send to Joel Stellman.

          “Dear Mr. Stellman,” one of the drafts began, “I received your lovely pictures. I enjoyed looking at them during work, they brighten my day.”

          Gretta had a thought that never occurred to her as she was writing one of the letters. She always assumed the pictures were meant for her to see, but how could Mr. Stellman even know who was opening his bills when they came? He didn’t address them to anyone specifically. It had just been plain luck that she received both of his bill payments.

          That thought reinforced Gretta’s belief the pictures were meant for her. She imagined it was fate that brought his payments to her desk the last two months, and she had no doubt she would continue to receive them.

          Finally, about a week before his next bill was supposed to arrive she sent the letter. It was almost a full page long, and hand written.

          In it, she thanked Joel Stellman for the pictures and commended him for always paying off the balance due on his card. So many people, she wrote, simply pay off the minimum while they continue to run up huge debt. Such a lack of foresight these people had, she wrote.

          The next week at work was tedious. Gretta began to wonder if she made the right decision by sending the letter. She had occasional panic attacks, thinking of Joel Stellman reading the letter aloud to his friends and laughing.

          Gretta still had one of his pictures hanging on her cubicle wall. She constantly debated in her head whether she should take it down.

          A comment made by Shirley Feinstein one afternoon almost did.

          “You sure must be fond of your cousin,” she asked Gretta unexpectedly.

          Gretta was slightly taken aback. “I’m sorry?”

          “Your cousin,” Shirley said as she pointed at the picture. “You said he was your cousin.”

          “Oh, yes. Him. He’s doing fine.”

          Shirley opened her mouth as if to say something, then smiled and walked away. Gretta immediately became worried.

          What if they know it’s not my cousin, she thought? Could she get fired for taking the picture? Was it against company policy?

          When she got home that night, eight days before Joel Stellman’s next bill payment was supposed to arrive, she saw a letter waiting for her in the mailbox. It was from his address. Gretta walked inside and put the letter on her kitchen table. She sat down and stared at it. She was afraid to open it. What if he was mad she took the pictures? Maybe they weren’t intended for her.

          After almost an hour of deliberation, she began to open the envelope.

          Inside was a handwritten letter. The handwriting was perfect. This reaffirmed to her that Mr. Stellman was a gentlemen.

          Dear Gretta, the letter began, thank you so much for writing, dear. My son has read your letter and he likes it very much. Joel doesn’t get out much. He usually comes home right after work and goes to his room to watch television. He asks me to send in his bills for him because I’m home during the day and he doesn’t have time to go to the post office. I’ve been sending in his pictures because I just feel the world is so impersonal and I though it might be nice for someone to see the face of a person to go with a name. I’m sure you see lots of different names every day.
          I’ve sent his pictures for the past year. Have you been receiving them all? No, that’s a stupid question, you probably haven’t. I am so glad you enjoyed seeing even just one. I don’t have much else to say. Thank you again for noticing. Sincerely, Marjorie Stellman.

          Gretta sat as she listened to the drone of refrigerator. She wondered who else had been receiving his payments with the pictures before she did. Whoever it was, they obviously didn’t care enough to even mention it.

          She was initially worried that someone who had received the other pictures noticed the one in her cubicle. After rereading the letter, however, she became much more calm. Gretta went to bed shortly after and fell asleep quickly. She felt like a person who had overcome a great obstacle and knew that everything was somehow going to be all right.

          The next day at the office Gretta worked diligently and didn’t notice how quickly the time passed. When she finally stopped to look at the clock on her desk it was already 3:30. She had been working steadily the whole day, and even took lunch at her desk. Gretta had not worked this fervently at her job in a long time.

          As the day was winding down and the employees were milling about ready to leave, Brad approached her with a strange grin on his face. Gretta thought it was the grin of a real estate agent.

          “Gretta, me and a couple of the others are planning on seeing the cabaret at Theatre Square,” he said.

          Gretta simply nodded her head. She wasn’t sure why Brad was telling her this.

          “Are you interested in joining us, we’d love to have you.”

          “I don’t think so, no,” she replied.

          “Why not? It’s fun, it’s cultural, it’s art!” He emphasized the word “art.”

          Gretta let out a quick, high laugh. Brad was startled for a moment; he had never actually heard her laugh before.

          “Art is just people trying to make sense of their confusion and misery,” she replied.

          Brad stared at her blankly. He wasn’t expecting that she would decline the invitation, much less offer some sort of critique on the subject.

          “Well then. We’ll miss you there.”

          Gretta smiled and turned toward the elevator. There was no one else on as she rode down the seven flights to the lobby. As she left the building, she noticed a painter on the street peddling his wares. A woman in her mid-twenties was buying a picture from him of the Allegheny River as seen from Point State Park. Gretta turned the corner and heard the honk of a steamship, which was traveling through the point where three rivers converge just outside the city.

Bryan Yurcan works as a journalist in upstate New York and is looking to move back to his hometown of New York City.