Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  Ida seemed to have two all-consuming preoccupations. The first was “cuteness.” While for most of us, “cuteness” was an admirable quality, for Ida, it meant anyone who annoyed her—which was pretty much everybody.

  “That plastic wrap distributor, he thinks he’s real cute,” she’d say, stamping out a cigarette. “Charges us for twenty cases, then only delivers eighteen. Well, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

  “Getting what’s coming” seemed to be Ida’s standard punishment for anyone who was “cute.”

  After badmouthing all the people in the food service industry who thought they were “real cute,” Ida inevitably turned her guns on us. To hear her tell it, our entire staff was nothing but a bunch of seasoned degenerates. “I don’t want any of you wisenheimers getting cute with me, either,” she’d glower, pointing at us with her cigarette clamped between her knuckles. “If you so much as think about helping yourself to anything here that’s not yours, you’ll get what’s coming to you so fast it’ll knock your teeth out. Got that?”

  Alicia just looked at Ida stonily, but I had to avoid eye contact with Mercedes and Timothy to keep from cracking up. Ida’s obsession with honesty amused me to no end given how much Shuggie’s lied to its customers about the food that it sold. The “homemade” cookies were shipped in from a bakery out in Red Hook, while the “fresh” chicken salad and cole slaw were loaded up with so much MSG that eating them bordered on an out-of-body experience. The “seasonal” fruit salad came in cans the size of paint drums; it was our job to doctor it up by picking out the dead-giveaway maraschino cherries and replacing them with cut-up days-old bananas and apples. The only truly homemade thing at Shuggie’s was its freshly squeezed orange juice, and this was on the menu only because, two years ago, the’ Shuggies’ daughter, Rhonda, had gone on a juice diet.

  “We plunked down four hundred bucks for this industrial-sized juicer, and then she gave up after only three weeks because she claimed it was turning her skin orange,” said Ida. “I told her, ‘For Chrissake, Rhonda, it’s not the fruit that’s turning your skin orange, it’s that bronzing creme you use.’ But oh no. She thinks she’s cute, my daughter. Would she listen? No. So now she’s still fat, her skin is still orange, and I’m stuck with the goddamn juicer.”

  The other subject that seemed to obsess Ida was virginity.

  “Don’t give it away, girls,” she lectured us at the end of every shift as we hung up our aprons and primped to meet our boyfriends. “Get a ring on your finger first. I am telling you. Your hymen for a diamond.”

  When Mercedes and I snickered, she barked, “Don’t get cute with me. Take it from one who knows. Men won’t pay the cow if she gives milk for free.”

  “Oooh,” said Timothy delightedly, raising his hand. “Who wants to field that one?”

  “Shut up, Timothy. I’m not talking to you,” Ida said. “I’m giving the girls here some valuable advice they’re not going to hear from those ridiculous, hairy-legged women’s libbers out there.”

  Mercedes nudged me and whispered, “Right. Because we all know how well Ida’s advice works for her.”

  For a moment, I didn’t get it. I was chewing over the remark about “hairy-legged women’s libbers.” I’d always shaved my legs, and what did leg hair have to do with wanting equal treatment under the law, anyway? I had the urge to stand up, hoist up my pant legs, and declare, Well, Ida, I so happen to he a women’s libber, and my calves are silky smooth, thank you very much.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Please,” Mercedes said. “If he hasn’t hit on you yet, it’s only because he hasn’t had the opportunity.”

  “Who?”

  Mercedes motioned with her chin toward the table where Louie sat, scraping whipped cream from the bottom of his cup with a coffee stirrer, cocoa powder freckling his bifocals.

  “No!”

  “Mm hm,” Mercedes said. “Every day, when he says he’s going to check the inventory, he’s really just sitting in the stockroom, waiting to ambush any girl who goes back there. So watch it.”

  “Ew. You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “He’s a rapist?”

  Mercedes a gave a contemptuous little laugh. “Please, the man can hardly breathe without a respirator. He just comes up behind you, wraps his arms around your waist, and goes ‘Gimme just one little kiss?’ in that same awful baby voice he uses when he wants another mocha.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said. “I’ll kill him.”

  “No you won’t,” Mercedes said. “You’ll be too busy laughing. He’s just pathetic.”

  Still, I wasn’t taking any chances. To apply for the job at Shuggie’s, I’d worn the most winning outfit I owned: a black miniskirt, a pink button-down blouse, and black cowboy boots. When I asked Louie if he needed any references, he just looked me up and down, then shook his head. “Nah,” he wheezed.

  At the time, I’d simply chalked this up to his perceptiveness: clearly, here was a man who knew competence and intelligence when he saw it. Stupidly, I assumed the world would always be judging me by my own values, not by its own prize-winning set of perversions.

  Looking around the restaurant, I realized that, except for Timothy and Eduardo—the Colombian dishwasher who was kept hidden away in the back—everyone on staff was a striking young female. In our slightly snug Shuggie’s T-shirts, we were like the Playboy Club of gourmet coffee bars.

  “From now on, I’m coming to work in sweatpants,” I told Mercedes. “I, for one, will not be treated as a sex object.”

  The next week, I came to work wearing a track suit, and Louie did, in fact, notice.

  “Hey, what happened to you?” he said. “Last week, you were such an attractive young girl.”

  I told him that working in food service with my skin exposed seemed like an invitation for health code violations.

  “Besides,” I couldn’t help adding, “last time I checked, a woman’s looks didn’t have anything to do with her ability to brew coffee. I expect to be valued for my mind, not my body.”

  “Oh, great,” Ida called across the counter. “Now you’ll never get a husband.”

  Yet by late afternoon, she had another young woman to badger. The Shuggies’ daughter, Rhonda, returned from vacation. Rhonda, it turned out, worked on the service line as a “counter manager.”

  Having heard Ida’s description of her, I expected Rhonda to look like an obese tandoori chicken. Instead, a trim, tanned young woman fairly bounded into the coffee bar as if she’d just spent a rigorous day on the tennis courts.

  “Hey, Ma. Hey, Timothy. Hey, Eduardo,” she sang out, hugging everyone hello. “I’m Rhonda,” she announced, then gave me a perfunctory hug, too. Her hair, I noticed, had been teased and moussed into a sort of mushroom cloud above her head, then dyed the color of overcooked spaghetti. Through her polo shirt, I could feel her ribs and the knobs of her spine. When she drew back, it was clear to me, too, that she’d had a nose job. While she had sleepy, hooded eyes like Ida’s and thick, giblet lips like Louie’s, her nose was minuscule, a pert gumdrop that gave you a view straight up her nostrils. Its shape and proportion were all wrong for her face. It reminded me of collages my brother and I used to make, where we’d cut out pictures of people’s features from magazines, then paste them onto pictures of other faces for amusement. To me, most nose jobs usually wound up drawing more attention to a person’s nose, not less; as soon as I realized someone had had their nose “fixed,” I couldn’t stop staring at it, trying to edit the old nose back in.

  Rhonda must have noticed me staring at her because after a few minutes, she touched her nose and said proudly, “You like? It’s a Dr. Rosenthal original. The best in Syosset. You won’t believe it, but I was actually born with Dad’s schnoz. This one was a Sweet Sixteen present from Moms.” She put her arm around Ida and gave her a little squeeze.

  “I thought it would help her find somebody suitable, but apparently not,” Ida said to me.

  “Oh, Mom,”
Rhonda said with a laugh. “Give it a rest, will you? I’m workin’ on it, okay?” Then she turned to me. “Seriously, I’ve still got his card somewhere, if you’re interested. He does boob reductions, too, you know.”

  On both Tuesdays and Thursdays, it was my turn to stay late with Timothy to help close up the restaurant. That evening, as I headed back to the kitchen with a tray of dirty cutlery for Eduardo, Timothy grabbed me by the elbow.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that just now,” he sang. Lifting the tray out of my hands, he stashed it under the microwave, then directed me back to the counter.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Let’s just say Rhonda likes Colombian coffee,” Timothy said, grinning. “And at this very moment, she’s giving her milk to it for free.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Right here? In the kitchen?”

  “Yuh-uh,” he said gleefully. “And let me tell you, Eduardo is the third Latino dishwasher she’s hired this year. She goes through Hispanic boys the way our customers go through paper napkins.”

  Other times during our shifts, Rhonda came up beside me and whispered, “Tell me if you see Ma coming back here.” Then she leaned over the utility sink and drank water straight from the faucet to wash down a Dexedrine or a couple of black beauties. As soon as Idas back was turned again, Rhonda gestured to the pile of baked goods displayed on the countertop. “Oh, look, Susie, aren’t those brownies broken?” she’d say loudly, winking. She’d lift up the plastic cake dome and gouge two brownies in half with her thumbnail. “Well, we can’t possibly sell those now, can we?”

  Pulling out the crumbled pieces, she’d shove one in the front of her apron and another directly into her mouth. “Here,” she’d whisper, giving me the other two sections, then motioning toward my pocket. Whether I was supposed to eat it or hang on to it for her was unclear.

  By the end of the third week, the full, chest-crushing drudgery of food service work had descended on me. I’d pretty much mastered everything there was to know about sticking a minute-meal into a paper bag, and all the colorful characters who’d kept me so entertained my first week were now nothing but an endless parade of irritants. It was amazing to me how quickly my gratitude and excitement deteriorated into resentment. The smell of coffee permeated not only my clothes but my hair, and by the end of my shift, my whole body began to feel like it was suffering from repetitive stress injury. Then, while we mopped the floors, stacked chairs, and scrubbed the urns—and Ida lectured us about preserving our virginity in formaldehyde—I tried to avoid Louie’s attempts to grope me behind an enormous carton of Sweetheart drinking straws while his bulimic, pill-popping daughter fucked the dishwasher in the utility closet.

  “So, sunshine. How’s the job?” my father asked, as I flung down my bookbag and dropped onto the couch. I’d had no idea how hard it was to stand on your feet all day or work for somebody else. At least with baby-sitting, you could sprawl on the sofa and be left alone.

  “I’m becoming a Communist,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s good,” my father said. “Now your grandmother will finally have someone to drink with.”

  Years ago, my grandmother had become a Communist for much the same reasons, I suspect, that kids today get their eyebrows pierced. While other people lost their jobs or betrayed their country for their Trotskyite beliefs, my grandmother’s commitment to Communism pretty much consisted of knocking back several martinis at a cocktail party, then hoisting her dress up over her head and yelling, “Hey, everybody, look! I’m a Communist!” Other than its shock value, only the “party” part of the “Communist Party” seemed to hold any appeal for her.

  “Yeah. Right, Ma. Sure you’re a Commie,” my father would say, rolling his eyes. “You hate authority, you hate the working classes, and you hate anyone telling you what to do. Who the hell are you kidding? If the Communists ever took over, you’d be the first person they shoot.”

  But now that I, myself, was technically a proletarian worker, my grandmother’s politics suddenly made more sense to me. After all, it was we food service peons who did all the real work at Shuggie’s. The owners just sat around on their asses, reaping all the profits and drinking decaf mocha all day.

  “If you ask me, Dad,” I said, “the government should control the means of production. They should seize the assets of the bourgeoisie. I mean, capitalists are nothing but a bunch of parasites. You should see the way Louie Shuggie carries on, making all of us wait on him for minimum wage, while his wife does nothing but yell at us. Karl Marx was right. ‘Workers of the world, unite.’ That’s what I say.”

  “That’s good, sweetie,” said my father. “Make sure to tell that to all the people you plan on belly-dancing for.”

  Soon, in fact, I did become involved in a truly proletarian enterprise: the burgeoning black market of the office building’s food court. Most of the other restaurants in the atrium were staffed by underpaid high school students, too. As soon as our bosses’ backs were turned, we bartered just about anything edible we could get our hands on: brownies, pita pockets, chocolate-covered pretzels, egg rolls, bratwursts.

  Amazingly, none of us honestly thought we were stealing. Although we weren’t so naive as to think our bosses might share this opinion, we never dreamed of lifting money from the till or filching supplies to sell on the street. In giving away a coffee or a yogurt, we were simply showing off. For the first time in our lives, we had some minute sense of sovereignty, some currency in a world beyond high school. We alone had the ability to slip free brownies to our peers! We had status; we were flexing our muscles. And let’s face it: we were flirting. A lot of those cookies were our idea of foreplay.

  Granted, it’s easy to be generous with things that aren’t yours, but we told ourselves they were ours, really. After all, didn’t we make those sandwiches? Didn’t we unpack all of those pretzels by hand?

  Ironically, never again in our working lives would we be so delighted to help each other out. As my peers and I got older, and began to assume jobs with real influence and responsibility, we tended to become more guarded with our favors. Phone calls went unreturned, rÉsumÉs got buried on desks. Years later, when my first book was published, I began receiving e-mails from people I hadn’t heard from in years, emerging from the ether to ask if I could possibly recommend them to my agent or give their manuscript to my publisher. And I’d often think, with some degree of resentment, Why should I help you? But at the very same moment, I’d pick up the phone and try to ingratiate myself to someone I hadn’t spoken to in decades, casually asking them if they wouldn’t mind passing a review copy along to their editor. In response, I’d usually hear the same chilly, noncommittal annoyance from their end of the line. Somehow, we were all more openhearted and generous when we were just scooping ice cream.

  One day when I came in wearing my glasses as well as sweatpants to work, Louie looked at me with open disdain. So did Ida.

  “How do you ever expect to catch a husband, dressed like a hockey player?” she asked.

  “What makes you think I want a husband, Ida?” I said blithely, opening a napkin dispenser. “Gloria Steinem calls marriage ‘breeding in captivity.’”

  “Oh please,” Ida said, lighting a cigarette. “Spare me the women’s lib crap.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “They say you’re either a feminist or a masochist, you know.”

  “Oh do they?” said Ida. For a moment, she studied me, looking me up and down as if I were a cut of beef. “So,” she said, taking a drag on her cigarette. “You really think you’re equal to any man?”

  “Sure. Of course,” I shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Okay, then,” said Ida. “From now on, it’s your job to refill the orange juice dispenser.”

  Refilling the orange juice dispenser was the hardest job at Shuggie’s. It required you to carry an enormous vat of fresh-squeezed juice in from the kitchen, climb a footstool, and pour it into the top of the machine. When completely full, the thre
e-gallon juice vat weighed, by my estimation, no less than 438 metric tons. Usually, Timothy or Eduardo did it. Now Ida informed them that they were to refrain from helping me.

  “Let’s see if her muscles are as big as her mouth,” she said, leaning against the tiles and fanning her cigarette smoke.

  Each day, as I struggled to hoist up the juice vat, I repeated, as loudly as I could, “Sisterhood is beautiful! Equality under the law shall not be abridged or denied on the basis of sex! Workers of the world, unite!”

  “Amen to that,” Timothy hooted.

  Ida just rolled her eyes. “You know where workers of the world unite?” she said. “The unemployment line.”

  Clearly, the Shuggies already knew what it had taken me several weeks to discover: I was nothing special. Like any other unskilled, minimum wage worker, my position could be filled in a snap by any number of high school girls willing to work for bupkus and dress like a streetwalker.

  Each day, Rhonda pawned off on me an increasing amount of, half-eaten bounty. I began to worry that when enough cookies, brownies, and minute-meals went missing, Louie and Ida would notice and begin their version of the McCarthy Witch Hunts. In their search for the culprit, the first person they’d look to would undoubtedly be the smart-ass women’s libber who claimed not to care about her appearance, who thought she was real cute with her politics, and who’d stupidly made a point of bringing in a copy of Fat Is a Feminist Issue and leaving it by the cash register in a misguided attempt to reach out to their bleached-blond diet-crazed daughter. In giving me the once-over, they’d find exactly the evidence they were searching for: the leftover cookies, the half-eaten brownies, the picked-over minute-meals bulging in my apron pocket. And then, what would I do? Point the finger at Rhonda?

  Yet one afternoon, we were busier than usual—it was a breezy spring day—and the counter felt positively besieged. Even Louie and Ida felt compelled to press themselves into service. The line of customers extended out the door and seemed to repeat itself like a Mobius strip of humanity. We kept dashing back and forth to the kitchen to restock. We were out of bags—no, we needed napkins! Someone get more napkins! And quick, more Sweet’n Lows! And more fruit salad, too! The frenzy made Timothy, Mercedes, and me positively giddy with adrenaline.