Profile: Kim Russell

“Here’s our wet-n-wild Kim!” teases Mark. We’re sitting in the Richardson Room when he reaches for his phone so he can show me a video of Kim and one other member of the Facilities Management custodial staff playing in the sprinklers behind Hoben on a hot day last spring. It’s Girls Gone Wild, he says. Custodian style. Kim stops him before he gets to his back pocket, laughing. “You get outta here!” she says. Her eyes disappear from smiling so big. She likes when they pick on her. Mark says they target her because she takes it so well. Kim enjoys their company most the time. 

Everyday at 11:30, Kim eats lunch with the same FacMan employees: Dylan, Stephanie and Mark. I meet her at the end of her lunch hour the next day. Before she can finish throwing her trash out, the other three have already made their way down the hall to exit the building. Kim is annoyed because they’re supposed to walk out together, but she doesn’t yell for them to wait up. 

“They do that sometimes,” she mumbles, resigned. 

Kim doesn’t have a lot of friends. Ever since her best friend from childhood died 20 years ago, and her husband of seventeen years divorced her “for no reason”, Kim keeps mostly to herself. She says it’s because all of her friends want to party.

“I’m not a partier. I don’t party. I’m not a drinker. I’m not a dope smoker.” 

“Everybody tells me I’m boring.”

She prefers to stay at home and let her dog, Magnus, “man handle” her, while she paints or quilts or makes stained glass windows. Kim wants to be an artist. She’d quit her job if she could make a living out of it. 

When she’s not creating something, she’s watching Maury. 

“I wanna watch them idiots fight 'cause they’re so stupid.”

She’s convinced the talk show is a set up. It has to be. There can’t be that many stupid people in the world, she thinks. She likes Maury because it make her feel better.

“I think, maybe I don’t have it so bad after all.”

If she could go anywhere in the world, it would be Jamaica. 

“I would probably go just ‘cause I know all the Jamaicans here and I probably don’t have to pay to stay anywhere.” She laughs and her eyes disappear again. She wants to go to Jamaica for the beaches, even though she won’t put a bathing suit on.

“Although, if I was in Jamaica I would never see anybody again so I probably wouldn’t give a shit! Who cares, right?”

A voice interrupts her on the walkie talkie. It’s Kathy saying they need help over in Severn. Kim tells me the custodian responsible for Severn was caught sleeping, and after going three days without pay, he came back and retired. She mutters something mean about Kathy while she turns down her radio. She wears an amethyst ring on one of her fingers, drawing attention to her nails which are long and painted lilac, the way professionals do it. Her short auburn hair is combed neatly and shines. If it wasn’t so early in the morning, she might have just come from the salon.

A fun day for Kim is when she, her sister and her friend Donna go quilt shop hopping for sales. When she tries to do something different, it never pans out. Once she wanted to see a baseball game but couldn’t find her way into the parking lot.

“I got pissed off and went to the mall.”

Kim has no desire to find another husband or boyfriend. She misses her two grown boys but Magnus fills the silences of her home and the empty side of the bed at night. 

She says her life was always quite simple. When she was still married, she took care of the pigs and cows on her countryside property in Otsego. She used to kill the animals for their meat, but stopped when she got attached to one of the pigs. She named it Precious. 

Her husband let her keep the house and bought himself another property not too far away, so every once in awhile, she makes him come over to fix things for her. 

Around 8:30am, she walks into the Security Office. Shane and Dave grin. They’re expecting her. Shane teases her with a story and she just smiles. They have to be nice to her, or else she won’t take out their trash. She tells me that not everyone is nice to her around Hicks. She likes cleaning here but misses Hoben since they changed everyone’s placement this year. She misses the kids. 

She heads toward the back of the office and returns a few minutes later with their carpet sweeper. Dave tells her she can’t keep taking it, that she’s racking up the fees. She walks out of the office with it and a grin anyway. These guys are something like friends to Kim.

She wears the same outfit everyday. A pair of faded blue jeans, white sneakers, a gray Kalamazoo College t-shirt from the Bookstore. She doesn’t feel like changing when she gets home from work, so she stays in this outfit while she watches Maury or quilts or plays with Magnus, until she goes to bed, putting it back on just a few hours later and returns to a sleeping campus.

Intended publication...The Index?

Word Count: 905