Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 19

  Suddenly, everything struck us as inordinately funny. “Yoo hoo. Handsome, over here!” Timothy whispered as we watched a guy pick his ear with a coffee stirrer. Then a woman came in wearing an unflattering power bow and we quickly rechristened her “Bozo.”

  We got so busy whispering snide, sidelong comments to each other that I guess we forgot to pay attention to what we were doing. Timothy accidentally hit the liquid soap dispenser so forcefully that some of the soap squirted across the tile floor, and before he could wipe it up, I slipped on it. At the moment I slipped on it, I just happened to be carrying one of the enormous aluminum vats filled with freshly squeezed orange juice.

  “Oh, I cried.

  For an instant, the entire coffee shop seemed to freeze. And then, all the customers on line appeared to take a collective step back and gasp as three gallons of freshly squeezed orange juice flew up into the air.

  At that precise moment, Louie was standing with his back to me. He’d just rung up a sale. In a moment of absurd, almost supernatural choreography, the arc of juice crested brightly like an orange rainbow, then splashed down at the exact moment that the cash register sprung open, landing in the money drawer with one enormous, ejaculatory splatter.

  It drenched everything.

  Orange juice flooded the troughs of nickels, dimes, pennies, and quarters. The paper money slots were swimming in juice; you couldn’t even see the bills, only rectangular pools of orange, with bits of pulp floating around on the top. Juice streamed down the sides of the cash register drawer, dripping steadily onto the tile floor like a citrus fountain. The buttons on the register were sticky-wet. The countertop surrounding it was one giant orange puddle. Two enormous stacks of paper bags and napkins beside it were sopping. And so, of course, was Louie. The entire front of his green Shuggie’s apron appeared to be lacquered to his chest with orange juice.

  For a moment, nobody said anything. As I hoisted myself woozily up off the floor, everyone sort of collected around the juice-flooded cash register drawer and stared down into it. Slowly, Louie reached in and pulled out a matted stack of five-dollar bills that were so wet, they practically came apart in his hands. He looked down at them, stunned, and for a moment, he appeared about to cry.

  Whenever people get fired in the movies, it’s symphonic; the pressures on them build steadily, hurtling toward some imminent disaster, until a boss shrieks, “Jensen! That’s it! You’re fired!” Then Jensen either whips off his apron and stalks out of the store yelling, “That’s okay because I quit!”—or, if he’s a professional of some sort—does the walk of shame through his office holding a single file box and a houseplant while everyone in the entire office gathers around him and looks on.

  At Shuggie’s, it was nothing remotely like that. After Timothy and I cleaned up the blitzkrieg of orange juice as best we could, we finished out our shift as usual. Only afterward, as I was hanging up my apron and punching out, did Louie came back into the storage room. For once, I didn’t flinch. “So,” he wheezed wearily, stroking his mustache. “Just how much longer were you planning on working for us?” When I told him just another week or two, he nodded. “I think that’s probably best,” he said.

  It wasn’t really a firing, but still: I didn’t tell my father. I could envision only too well the look of incredulous delight on his face, followed by the gleeful phone calls to his poker buddies. “Arthur,” he’d begin, “wait’ll you hear this.” With each new telling, my story would gather momentum, until the orange juice became a veritable Halley’s Comet, a gargantuan citrus meteorite slamming down into the cash register. Inevitably, phone calls for me would start coming in. “So, Susie,” my Uncle Fred would say, “I hear you’re the new spokeswoman for Minute Maid?”

  I felt disgusted with myself. But, as teenagers are wont to do, I quickly blamed my incompetence on the Shuggies. Something like that was bound to happen, I told myself, given how they treated their workers. With their penny-pinching, their psychodramas, their reactionary sexism, how could they possibly expect me not to get distracted?

  Had I been older, perhaps, I might’ve been able to see it differently. Had I been wise enough to actually piece together the fragments of the Shuggies’ lives that I’d been privy to, I might have recognized a family portrait far more heartbreaking than contemptible. But it never occurred to me to wonder: what disappointments, what tragedies, what bad luck stories could’ve possibly led Louie and Ida to become the people they were? A restaurant like theirs was never a hobby. Why were they running such a backbreaking, thankless business when most people their age were retiring? Why were they spending seven days a week in a humid little food stall, nickel-and-diming suppliers and high school kids, counting every napkin and coffee lid, all the while secretly, desperately trying to resuscitate the strained, sexual game-playing of their youth?

  New York City wasn’t a small prairie town where a woman named Darlene could waitress at the same waffle house for twenty-five years. Even people who spent their whole lives in food service in Manhattan moved on to bigger, better restaurants. What must it have been like for the Shuggies—or even for Rhonda, for that matter—to see everyone on their payroll moving on, the kids going to college, the actresses landing roles Off Broadway, everyone bouncing off them like a trampoline, leaping higher and then away, contempt and relief bright on their faces?

  Of course, it never occurred to me to be so reflective. A few days after I’d turned in my apron from Shuggie’s, the fiasco with the orange juice suddenly began to strike me as incredibly funny. It was possibly the most slapstick thing I’d ever done.

  The proverbial last laugh, however, was on me. Two weeks later, I received my first and only paycheck. It had been printed out by a payroll service on computerized, watermarked paper, and the hours on the pay stub corresponded exactly to those I’d recorded meticulously in the back of my trigonometry notebook. Yet the discrepancy between my “gross” and my “net” pay was so large, there had to be a mistake. Either that or it was the Shuggies’ idea of some vicious parting joke.

  I took it down to my father’s office. “I think we’ve got a lawsuit to file,” I announced, dropping my paycheck ceremoniously on his desk.

  He picked it up, and reviewed the list of deductions with me: federal, state, city, and something onerous called “FICA.”

  “Nope. Looks right to me,” he said.

  “You have got to be kidding,” I said. “That’s almost 35 percent less than I’m supposed to have gotten. That’s practically not much more than I earn baby-sitting. Where the hell did it all go?”

  My father looked at with astonishment. “To the government,” he said.

  “The government?” I fairly spat. “The government took all that money?”

  He smiled. “Them’s taxes, baby girl.”

  “No fucking way!” I shouted. “Who told the government they could take all my money like this? That’s robbery!”

  Just then, my father’s secretary buzzed over the intercom. “Mr. Gilman, your wife is on the phone,” she said.

  “I worked my ass off for that money!” I cried. “They have no goddamn right to take it like that. Who told them they could do that? I’m not even old enough to vote yet!”

  My father chuckled and said to his secretary, “Tell my wife I’ll call her back. Tell her I’m watching our daughter turn from a Communist to a moderate.”

  “I’m going to sue those thieving bastards,” I shouted. “I’m going to launch a class action lawsuit against the IRS, and the federal government, and the—”

  “Whoops. Wait. I think she just went straight to conservative,” my father laughed.

  Then he quickly dialed my Uncle Arthur, pressed the button on his speakerphone, and leaned back in his chair luxuriantly. The sun was setting above the Hudson, and coppery light played over his bemused face as he and Arthur listened raptly to my rant and chuckled. But I was too riled up to care. My paycheck was an outrage. The world was unjust. I was going to fight for what was mine, d
ammit. I’d learned a thing or two about working for a living. Now just let anyone try to pry the pennies out of my hot little feminist’s hands. I was revising my opinions. I was hatching new plans.

  Chapter 9

  How Clever Are We?

  DID YOU KNOW it’s possible to survive nuclear fallout by eating miso soup for breakfast?

  Neither did I. But the year I went away to college, my mother discovered macrobiotic cooking, whose devotees seemed to believe you could cure everything from radiation poisoning to excessive ear wax by avoiding dairy products.

  A number of my friends found that once they headed off to college, their parents developed irritating hobbies, too. There was some excessive indoor gardening, some criminal needlepoint, even a recreational interest in prescription pharmaceuticals. More often than not, these hobbies also entailed taking a long, meaningful drive to Sears, then converting my friends’ bedrooms into useful sewing rooms and dens, replacing their canopy beds and prized beer can collections with modular furniture, wicker baskets, La-Z-Boy recliners.

  The first Christmas I arrived home from college, I found a pyramid of Plexiglas containers in our kitchen stocked with dried grains, fermented soybeans, and organic yeast. At first I thought it was a collection of specimen jars, or perhaps a decorative handicraft made by some mentally retarded child using dried peas and pinto beans. But no. Apparently, I was looking at our dinner.

  My brother, who’d been waiting up for me, could barely contain himself.

  “Oh, wait’ll you see this,” he squealed as I walked, stunned, through the kitchen. “She’s really done it this time. Open the fridge. Open the cabinets. Guess what we’re eating for breakfast tomorrow? Did you say ‘miso soup and buckwheat groats’? Mm. Yum. Why, how ever did you guess? Miso soup and buckwheat groats is exactly right. Here at Chez Gilman, we now eat miso and buckwheat groats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

  “Explain, please,” I said, eyeing a landslide of dried seaweed packages cascading off the top of the refrigerator.

  “Macrobiotic,” he practically sang. “That’s right. This time, Mom’s gone macrobiotic. Or as I like to say, ‘macroneurotic.’ Soy paste. Boiled kelp. Tofu pudding. Endless discussions about how you can use bean sprouts to cure hepatitis. But wait,” he cried. “It gets better. Check out the living room.”

  Our living room—once groaning with bookshelves, overstuffed furniture, and milk crates full of yellowing magazines—was completely empty, except for a pile of gray foam mats piled neatly in one corner.

  “John,” I said slowly. “John. Where’s the sofa?”

  “Oh, that little thing? That’s in your room. All the living room furniture is now in your room. To go with our new, healthy, macrobiotic lifestyle, Mom’s turned the apartment into a Japanese exercise studio. Yup. That’s right. Twice a week at 4:00 P.M. we get to see seven fat ladies groaning on the floor. By the way,” he said, “good luck finding your bed. I think it’s underneath the bookcase.”

  “Augh. I so do not want to go home for Spring Break,” I moaned to my friend Henry the next semester. It was the end of midterms, and Henry and I were in the student lounge pounding away on dueling electric typewriters in what had become a kamikaze-like attempt to complete all the papers we’d smartly put off writing until the last possible minute.

  “Tell me about it.” Henry stubbed out his cigarette. “My stepmother wants me to come back to Dallas and clean out my bedroom so she can turn it into a dog run for her three fucking Pekingese. Then, she wants me to escort someone’s dumb-ass niece to a cotillion. That means I’ll get to spend an entire weekend at a country club watching a drunken girl in a bubble dress throw up behind a pillar. Oh boy,” he said. “Can’t wait for that one.”

  I rested my forehead on the top of my typewriter. Henry was one of my best friends at college. He played the curmudgeon to my diva, and we liked to think of ourselves as terribly outrÉ and witty. We had been awake for what felt like 457 continuous hours, whacked out of our minds on coffee, cough syrup, cigarettes, No-Doz, Pez, Fritos, and donuts.

  “Seven days of listening to how lepers can heal themselves eating fermented tofu,” I groaned. “Can’t I just go home to your house for Spring Break?”

  “You mean Belfast?” Henry snorted. Henry came from a wealthy Texas oil family known for its horses, alcoholism, and flamboyant meanness. Although his parents had divorced over a decade ago, time had done nothing to diminish their very active hatred for each other. Henry’s father took malicious pleasure in regularly hauling Henry’s mother into court to reduce her alimony payments. Henry’s mother responded by routinely reporting her ex-husband to the IRS, then jetting off with Henry in tow to live in Rome, Sydney, and Monaco, where she collected and discarded husbands the way some women might handbags or commemorative spoons. To follow Henry’s succession of stepfathers, you basically needed a program. “No, Alessan-dro was the art dealer,” he’d correct. “Alejandro was the bullfighter.”

  Now Henry set his coffee cup down on the table like a gavel. “Hot damn,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?”

  Instead of going home for Spring Break, Henry suggested, why didn’t we both drive down to North Carolina? His girlfriend from home and my boyfriend both went to Duke University. If we ignored the speed limit, we could make the run from Providence, Rhode Island, down to Durham in less than twenty-four hours.

  “Think of it,” said Henry. “Not only will we royally piss off our parents, but we’ll also get laid.”

  At college, horniness was pretty much a full-time occupation. You could read all the Schopenhauer you wanted, but eventually, every late-night intellectual discussion over a Domino’s pizza devolved into sex talk. My hall mates and I were seventeen and eighteen years old, but we liked to think of ourselves as erotic experts, brimming with sexual savoir faire. “Come on in,” my friend Lisa would say blithely when I knocked on her door. “I’m just putting cornstarch on my diaphragm.”

  Both Henry and I secretly worried we weren’t getting it nearly enough. The few pathetic liaisons we’d had at college had been even more pathetic than we’d talked them up to be. I’d dated only two guys, one of whom turned out to have a steady girlfriend, the other of whom announced, after three impassioned evenings, that he “just wasn’t into women with serious breasts.”

  “Serious breasts. That was the phrase he used,” I said to Henry. “You want to go near that one?”

  “Hell, at least you’ve been dumped by two people. I’ve only had one reject me,” Henry said, gnawing at a fingernail. For all his Texas swagger, Henry was a surprisingly delicate boy. He was cherub-faced and built like an Irish wolfhound—slight, sinewy, taut with nervous energy. His skin was milky white, like tracing paper. The girl who’d rejected him had stood him up on his birthday in order to go out with the best friend of JFK Jr.

  As soon as we finished our last midterm, Henry and I loaded up his silver Toyota Supra as quickly as possible. Everyone else was heading home for Easter. They were squeezing themselves onto Amtrak’s Yankee Clipper train that lurched along the Northeast corridor stinking of overheated hot dog buns. They were flying home standby. They were sharing rides in hatchbacks crammed with dirty laundry. Henry and I made a point of “casually” ambling through the hallways, asking if anyone had extra condoms.

  “That’s right. Rub it in, you lucky bastards,” said our friend Burr.

  We could barely contain our glee. Settling in to Henry’s sports car with a bag full of birth control, Diet Pepsi, and Twix, we felt like outlaws, renegades, sexual mercenaries.

  Now, as Henry gunned the engine, I shouted, “We’re flying!”

  “Shit. This is nothing. Hang on.” Henry jammed down on the accelerator. The Supra growled and we careened down the highway with a burst of propulsion.

  “Next stop,” he called out, “Poontang, North Carolina.”

  I stretched back and propped my legs up on the dashboard, letting the wind ravage me. The moment Henry and I hatched ou
r plan, I’d telephoned my boyfriend, Jeremy. It was 5:30 in the morning but he was wide awake in the kitchen with some of his fraternity brothers, building a yard-long bong out of a piece of industrial tubing they’d removed from the dishwasher.

  “Whoa. You’re coming down? When?” he shouted. The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” was blasting insanely in the background.

  “After my last midterm,” I shouted back. “But I won’t get to your place until, like, 3:00 A.M. tomorrow. Is that cool with you?”

  There was a pause. “Only if you don’t wear any panties,” he yelled.

  And so, now, I wasn’t. Sitting bare-assed beneath a silver miniskirt in a matching silver sports car that smelled like shoe polish and onion rings, I felt positively sensual, feline, and heady with confidence. I was a wild woman—chafing a bit, perhaps—but unleashed in all my reckless glory. For I moment, I actually believed I was the only girl ever to go on a road trip, too. It seemed to me like women so rarely tore off down the highway in a blaze of adventure. Then again, this might’ve been because none of my New York friends or I had a driver’s license. And urban hillbillies that we were, we were actually proud of this fact, too: So what if we couldn’t drive a car? Cars were for people who lived in the suburbs. Besides, the only thing we ever really associated with driving was the phrase “vehicular manslaughter.”

  Henry had expected Interstate 95 to be a parking lot, but we zoomed across Connecticut without a hitch. Since he was from Texas and I was from New York City, both of us were chauvinists. People from other states, we believed, were inferior simply by virtue of their geography. As we stood on line for the bathrooms at the Friendly’s outside New Haven, we elbowed each other knowingly. Look at these New England bumpkins with their beer bellies, their souvenir sweatshirts, their whiny, scabby-kneed children. These were small-town, “average Americans,” leading pathetic lives of ordinariness and quiet desperation. As opposed to us, of course. We were merely driving l,200 miles in seventeen hours for the sole purpose of getting laid. How clever were we?