The Interns
Michael Guendelsberger
Neil shows up at Marilyn’s office and tells her they’re not going home; he wants to surprise her and take her someplace downtown. Marilyn is delighted—in twenty-five years of marriage, she has never described Neil as spontaneous but now and again, like tonight, he makes her think otherwise. Such nights always seem to come at the right time as if Neil can sense that she needs something different, a break from their regular post-workday routine at the kitchen table. Since the boys went off to college, they seldom use the formal dining room anymore. For a moment, Marilyn worries that the impromptu journey could be ruined by the lack of parking spaces in the claustrophobic warehouse district, which is often the main reason Neil hates to go down to the city. They circle a few blocks before he finds a spot on a side street. “It’s a short walk,” Neil tells her as they get out of the car. He’s still in a good mood. “The interns at work told me about it.”
This part of the city has really come back to life in the last few years. A decade ago, no one from the suburbs came down here for fear of muggings or a beating or getting your car windows smashed. Instead of boarded windows and vulgar graffiti, storefronts have been recast with quaint names that include words like “apothecary” or “haberdashery.” The clientele is mostly young professional and white. Still, there are Indian restaurants and one small bistro advertising authentic Egyptian cuisine. Neil passes these and refuses to say where they are going, laughing about it being a surprise.
It turns out to be a good one. Marilyn has heard about Strickfaden’s from some of her twenty and thirty something colleagues. It’s a brewery, she recalls, specializing in German beers with long, dizzying names she cannot pronounce. Neil confirms this as they enter the long, low building. “This used to be an elevator parts factory”, he tells her. The new owners have done little to change its warehouse past but looking out across the open floor from the lobby, it’s not hard to imagine the giant thrumming machinery that once lived here. In the very back, Marilyn can see massive stainless steel drums as tall as their house. Pipes and hoses run from them off into other corners of the factory and for a moment she thinks of an uncle she watched die in a hospital years ago—a man who had more hoses and cords stretching out from him than he did natural appendages. She shakes this off and focuses on Neil, who is telling her the history of the building. He points out the low, waist high brick walls running throughout the main seating area and explaining that they weren’t here originally. They have been added to give the place a sense of division. “You can come here and eat”, Neil says, “and still feel separate from the bar area.” A high-top L-shaped bar wraps around more silver squat tanks and a large black board displays the current draft selections in neat capital red chalk letters. Marilyn sees that almost every seat at the bar is taken. Neil takes her hand and they are being led away by a girl in a black miniskirt toward a narrow table back by the floor to ceiling windows. Everything about this place looks hard, coarse, and dark: the sharp right angles of the brick dividing walls, the gray stone, the exposed beams and thick black pipes that stretch the length of the high ceiling and disappear into the walls.
The girl in the mini-skirt gives them their menus (little more than a three by five notecard affixed to a thin piece of wood by a black binder clip) and flicks on the battery powered votive candle at the center of the table. The restaurant is loud—the voices around them blending into one indiscernible din of noise but Neil leans in toward across their round table, his grin large and looming in the light of the fake candle.
“Pretty neat,” he says.
Marilyn nods. “How did you hear about it?” she asks.
“The interns,” Neil says. “They love places like this.”
She looks around at the other tables. This is a place for young professionals, people who would rather go to a happy hour than go home. She sees a group of twenty or thirty-somethings at a long high table and can tell that most of them are drunk already. They laugh too high and too long. One young man doubles over, his grin stretched back almost to his ears, and pats the back of a girl standing next to him.
“Did I tell you about the interns?” Neil says.
Marilyn doesn’t think so.
The server comes and they order exotic draft beers—an Einsam Dunkel for Neil and a Zufrieden Hefe Weissbier for Marilyn. The server tells her it’s light, it’s effervescent. When it arrives, and she takes a hesitant sip of the cloudy, bubbly ale and is pleased. Neil’s pint glass might as well be filled with motor oil; the color is virtually the same. He offers her a sip. It tastes like vanilla and coffee and she is quietly pleased with her own selection, feeling as if she has now connected with these young professionals around her. Marilyn orders a salmon salad; Neil asks for fish tacos.
“So the interns,” Neil says and Marilyn encourages him, sips her beer, and says, go on, go on. “You know how we get a new crop of them every semester,” he continues. “We got a new group a few weeks ago and so now we’ve got five or six of them in our department. They all take lunch together down in the cafeteria. Me and Bill Gabbard, we go to lunch around the same time and usually these interns get one of the tables near us. Now I want to tell you, we’re not trying to eavesdrop. It’s just that they’re so loud. We’ve tried talking about work stuff or venting about some meeting we’ve had but I swear it’s like we physically can’t do it. We get so distracted by these kids. I’m telling you, it’s like watching a reality show unfold in real time. They’re so busy trying to impress one another. This one is talking about a date he had over the weekend. This girl thinks her boyfriend back home is cheating on her because he didn’t video chat with her a couple times. One of the other guys says she should cheat on him and teach him a lesson and he’s willing to help her out. And they all laugh about it. They go out all the time. That’s how I heard about this place; I overheard them talking about it.”
The food comes quicker than Marilyn would have expected. As she slices into the blackened salmon, Neil continues talking about the interns. “They’re an interesting bunch, these interns. The second or third day they’re down in the cafeteria for lunch, they’re all exchanging information. I don’t mean phone numbers or email addresses or anything. It’s social media stuff. They’re saying, hey what’s your name on this app. Are you on this platform? Did you see so-and-so’s picture on this thing? I can remember just trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl for her phone number back in high school. Hell, even college! It was a big deal. Now? You don’t even need a phone number. Bill and I laughed about it later.” Neil waves his hand around the dining area. “I overheard them talking about this place. They all come here. Or something like it. They said it was the best. Those were the words they used. What do you think?”
Marilyn smiles at him. “It’s different,” she says. “We’ve never been to a place like this.”
“Pretty neat,” Neil says again and drains his beer. When the server comes, he orders another one.
“Now there’s this one intern,” Neil says, his mouth working around the large bites of taco. “He works over in marketing. But the interns all know one another because there’s this three or four day boot camp that they all have to take. They call it a ‘workshop.’ On the last day of this workshop, they get their assignments—like they’re being deployed. You go to production. You’re in communications. You go up to marketing. The point I’m trying to make is that these interns, they’re literally scattered all over the building but they all have a sort of passing knowledge of one another.” Neil drains the beer and signals for another. “This kid in marketing, though, we never see him at lunch. Then he shows up today. ‘Check this out,’ Bill says to me because he’s got an eye for that sort of that thing. Bill knows when something’s about to happen. So we zero in on this kid and he comes over to the table where our interns are sitting. They’re finishing—standing up, collecting their trash, stuff like that. This marketing kid goes over to this one girl and she’s, you know, she’s caught the eye of a lot of guys in the building. Platinum blonde. Long eyelashes. Skirts so short there are guys lining up just to follow her up the stairs.”
“That’s sick.”
Neil shrugs. The next beer lands before him. “I’m just saying. People are really checking her out.”
“What’s her name?”
“Emma. And this kid from marketing, he’s just like all these others. You should see it, Marilyn. It’s a real sociological experiment. Bill and I laugh about it all the time. These other guys that sit at that table are all trying to sit next to her. They wait until she chooses her seat before they sit down. I honestly think they’d probably sit on each other’s laps just to be next to her if they thought it would be socially acceptable. Now, I don’t know if this Emma has a boyfriend or not but she is flirting hard with these other guys at the table. And I’m telling you: they’re eating it up. She’s laughing at their stupid jokes, touching their forearms, leaning into them whenever they say something remotely amusing. So here comes this kid from marketing and he goes up to her as everyone is tossing their trash and taking their trays to the dishwashing station. This poor guy is sweating. Even Bill sees it. But he gets right in there and starts chatting up this girl Emma. We can’t hear what he’s saying because there are a lot of people in the cafeteria at this point but whatever it is, he is really selling it. She’s smiling at him, nodding a lot, encouraging him. And here’s the best part: she gives him her info. That has to be what it is because he whips out his phone and types something into it. What else could it be? Can you think of anything?”
“I can’t,” Marilyn says and she continues to eat her salad.
“It’s really something else,” Neil says.
The noise in the brewery makes it hard to talk and when they’ve finished eating, Neil quickly pays the bill and they go out into the night. He’s had five beers—strong, dark ones—and gives up the keys to her without hesitation. He suggests they stop at another nearby bar, but Marilyn wants to get home. It’s getting late and they both have work in the morning. On the drive home, he leans his head against the passenger side window and doesn’t say much. When they get home, Neil goes inside and yanks his tie from his neck. He drapes it across the banister and Marilyn follows him upstairs. From the bathroom, she hears the bedsprings squeak as he sits down. The two dull thumps that follow tell her that he has taken off his black dress shoes. Marilyn pokes her head out the bathroom door to see him sitting on the edge of his side of the bed. He has removed his dress shirt and is staring at the long, low dresser that runs the length of the bed. “Bill and I, we just couldn’t believe it,” he says.
“What’s that?” Marilyn says. She pops out her contacts and drops them into the small plastic case on the vanity. She puts on her glasses—an older pair she keeps at home because she thinks the thick cats eye frames make her look like an aging spinster librarian.
“Bill is just beside himself. He can’t believe this kid strolled right up and got her number just like that.”
“You don’t know that’s what it was,” Marilyn says from the bathroom.
“Later,” Neil says, “me and Bill go out to get some water and who do we run into but this girl Emma. She sees Bill and gets this big grin on her face and addresses him by name. Says hello and shakes his hand. She says she’s heard all these great things about his group and how she’d love to learn more. She asks if maybe they could grab lunch and he could tell her more about the department. Bill says that all sounds great and she can look at his calendar and set up something. Bill didn’t introduce me. I thought about saying hello myself and shaking her hand but I just couldn’t get the words out.”
Marilyn looks in on him again, the old prescription in her glasses making him blurry and strange. “Neil?” she asks.
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’m just tired. You know what’s funny? When I started working right out of college, I tried to know everyone. Even the older guys. They were there in their suits and ties with their schedules and meetings and deadlines and I never gave them much thought at all. But I tried to learn their names. Maybe we made fun of them and thought of them as part of the scenery. They were just like the potted ferns in the lobby or the fake wood grain desks at everybody’s station. I don’t remember them now but I feel like they’re all probably still there. At least in some form or another.”
Marilyn looks in on him again and he is still in the same position, his eyes still locked on the low dresser. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he says. Marilyn steps back into the bathroom and finishes her bedtime routine. She brushes her teeth. She washes her face and moisturizes. As she slips out of her clothes and into her nightgown, she thinks back to her first job out of college. She worked in an administrative position for a small marketing firm. She is not surprised to see that she can still remember faces and names from that company. She sees men too, also in their suits and ties, but their faces have more definition and presence than what she suspects Neil sees in his mind. She sees their wide eyes and their wet lips, as if they had been subject to the constant darting of the pink triangular tips of their tongues. Marilyn can visualize their bellies, just starting to go soft, pushing wide the spaces between the lower buttons of their dress shirts. She flicks out the light in the bathroom.
Neil has stretched out on the bed even though he is still in his undershirt and black slacks. Marilyn notices a hole in the dress sock on his left foot—a little pinkish circle of flesh showing soft and vulnerable on that field of black pilling. He has closed his eyes and folded his hands across his chest. His stomach lifts and drops. For a moment, Marilyn is not sure it will go up again. She is seeing him as she expects to years from now in his casket. Then his lips part and he sighs. A snore escapes his nose. He mumbles something, his chest rises, and he breathes.
Michael Guendelsberger’s work has appeared in The Penman Review, Rougarou: A Journal of Arts and Literature, Oxford Magazine, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and others. His story, “Winter Break” appeared in the 2018 anthology Accursed, and his first novel, An End to Something, was published in 2014.