The Journey Prize Stories 27 (7 page)

Steve elbows past Cocoa with disdain, letting the kitchen door swing back in her face. Cocoa readjusts her boa as Steve recites his tight-ass rules: “We have a no loitering policy here; washrooms are only for paying customers. If you would like to be seated, you can leave your name at the hostess stand.” He turns to me: “If you don’t have anything to do, Windex the pie case.”

The pie cases are a bitch to clean. Throughout the evening, the pies molt millions of electromagnetic crumbs that stick to the mirrored shelves and the sliding glass doors. You have to take out the glass doors and then fit them back into the tricky little oovy-groovy slots that keep them on a track. By the time they fit back into place they’re all smudged up again and some prick has ordered another piece of crumby pie.

“Nice work,” says John, looking at the clean pie cases. Normally, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about this
noblesse oblige
shit, but with John, it’s just who he is, not like he’s trying to be some gauche fancy man. John treats everyone with respect. “Are you okay with that table of six?” he asks. He comes from old money, and he has a taste for opera and etiquette and for the sorts of men who would always break his heart.

My dad turned eighteen a few weeks after the Allies declared Victory. He enlisted on his birthday. In Kassel and Dresden and Frankfurt, the stench of bodies greeted the occupying troops. Men in uniform were like my dad, kids who left school to work in mills and munitions factories, or farm boys with big clumsy hands, or teenaged store clerks trying to grow hair
on their peach fuzz faces. German bulldozers moved mounds of rotting corpses into mass graves. Some boys passed out. They were there to clean up the rubble and rebuild.

“The war only ended on paper,” says my dad. “The Allied planes stopped their bombing runs with not much left to knock down. Just the old men and the Hitler Youth were left. ‘Guerrilla armies’ they would call them now, worse than trying to fight real men. The U.S. troops would be too honourable to shoot a child,” he says. “In the time it would take for an American soldier to look into the young boy’s eyes, the kid was going to shoot first.” Dad’s voice gets a little higher, a little less certain. “You don’t know what it’s like to face a child with a gun and know you have to pull the trigger first.” He is unaware that his voice has escalated, that he hasn’t blinked and his eyes look both fierce and watery, like he is on that edge of uncertainty, the wider gate yawning open. I want to ask him if he faced that child, if he pulled the trigger, but this is
verboten
.

We hold our breath. The air is combustible. The clock ticks. Then he pauses and breathes and recognizes us all again, as if he has just been away. “That’s why,” he says, “you’re not joining the cadets and you’re not wearing army pants. Young girls in army pants! That belittles the men who gave you freedom. If it weren’t for men in uniform, you would be speaking German now—or worse, Japanese.” I think it might be cool to speak Japanese, and freedom? “What freedom?” I ask under my breath. The Greyhound journey is anti-Odyssean, travelling anywhere to get away from home.

Wait staff place orders through an intercom that is connected to the kitchen, and our voices boom throughout the restaurant.
It’s pretty intimidating to hear your voice carried through the whole big place, and when we get new waiters, they always say “oh shit” the first few times when they’re holding the talk button down. Joyce is from Jamaica. This is her first night. She persistently presses the broadcast button and orders a “large cock.” The kitchen guys whistle encouragingly, and Billy offers her a taste of his cooking. John, deadpan and well manicured, gently suggests that she might try saying “Cola” instead of “Coke.” Steve has little veins that stand out on his neck. “This is unacceptable, Joyce. Wait staff pour their own fountain drinks. We’re not on island time here.” Joyce puts on a browbeaten face, but she sticks up her chin and mutters some rhythmic curse involving the word
bumbaclot
. She sings it softly, swinging her hips as she walks past Steve.

I’ve got three dinner plates on my left arm and two on my right. The one higher up on my left arm is sizzling hot, burning the tender crux of skin where the inside of my arm bends. Steve stops me so he can rearrange the garnishes. I clench my teeth and count to ten and give him the evil eye. He has never been a waiter. He just took some community college course on how to boss people around.

My dad trained for an elite force:
Blitz Polizei
—the Lightning Police. Their badge had a
C
for
Constabulary
with a lightning bolt through it, proclaiming
Mobility, Vigilance, Justice!
They chose him because he was an eagle-scout, sharpshooter, and state clay-pigeon champion. Lots of guys could shoot nineteen out of twenty clay pigeons, but he was the only one who never missed. The Constabulary was special-ops. Recruits underwent IQ and psychological tests, watched violent propaganda
films. “Some guys,” he says, “would have killed a German with their bare hands after seeing those films. Those were the fellows they weeded out, the ones who believed what they saw. Those ones got put on KP; spent their whole tour of duty peeling potatoes. The rest of us got six weeks of German language lessons so we could talk to people there. I don’t remember much now, but ‘HALT’: that’s the same in German and English.” My dad made sergeant in eighteen months. He turned down the job of Chief Detective of the Pittsburgh Police Department when he came home.

As the kettle whistles for my mom’s tea, my dad finishes the war and immigrates to Canada with my grandfather, leaving the world of Eisenhower, dishwashers, paved suburban driveways, and TV sets. Kids started taking drugs and burning their draft cards. He doesn’t understand the peace movement. There’s really no way of explaining it. He is still in the Lightning Police, spit-polishing his boots, saluting the flag, enlivened at every Sunday dinner by moral outrage. On the rare afternoons when he takes a nap, he tosses and moans, and yells out “HALT” with such anguish that he scares me. Living in the past is not nostalgia, it is shell shock.

My uniform is thick orange polyester. It might stop a bullet, but is designed only for the front lines of the service industry: they’re restaurant fatigues. An orange-polyester bodice with little puffy sleeves tops off an orange polyester A-line skirt. Ornamental brown buttons grace the front; a zipper fastens up the back. Ribbons of brown rick-rack encircle the edge of the sleeves. Cocoa’s finally got her coffee from the fresh pot. “Girl,” she says, “you is so ugly it looks like you got beaten
wit’ an ugly stick.” I try to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirrored pie case. For sure my frizzy hair looks like a lopsided Afro and my freckles stick out against the whiteness of my face. “Not much I can do about it,” I say. “If people have money here it’s for sympathy tips anyway; bourgeois assholes hiding dimes under their plates like it’s some retarded Easter egg hunt.”

A guy with a comb-over and an outdated plaid suit sits in Stacey-Jane’s section. He says something to her and she starts chewing on her pencil like she’s got to think about it hard. She goes over the menu, a tri-fold laminated behemoth with extra cardboard attachments for seasonal desserts and daily dinner specials paper-clipped to a long tail of pleated cocktail pictures. She’s heading over to me with the menu, trailing leaflets and table-tents. “Do we have something called a blow job?” she asks, “I don’t see it anyplace. Is it like a dessert?” Her voice is so plaintive and musical, like church bells ringing throughout the restaurant. I take a deep breath. Someone in the front suppresses a giggle. Billy yells out, “Come into the kitchen and we’ll help you figure it out, honey.” Cocoa is holding her breath so hard she looks like she’s going to explode but she waits, breathes deeply, relaxes, and then takes a big swig of coffee to get back her equilibrium. “Do you serve blow jobs where you work, Cocoa?” Stacey-Jane asks. Cocoa twists around and sprays her mouth full of coffee across my freshly Windexed pie case and three banquettes.

She coughs uncontrollably. As she wipes her face with a napkin, she smudges the gold lightning bolt on her cheek and spreads her rouge back toward her ears. I look Stacey-Jane in the eye. “Did that man ask you for a blow job?” I narrow my
eyes, trying to make him squirm. He grins back, gesturing toward Stacey-Jane with his hand on his crotch.

Michael is the campiest waiter. “We get that a lot here,” he says to Stacey-Jane. Billy yells out from the kitchen, “Sure bet you do, Michael.” Michael touches up Cocoa’s makeup while trying to explain the facts of life to Stacey-Jane. Oblivious to the giggles and immune to embarrassment, Stacey-Jane seems to have a magical, impermeable protective coating. “Steve’s the head waiter,” Michael explains. “You can always tell by his dirty knees.” Michael demonstrates, dropping to his knees and sticking out his tongue like a begging dog. Stacey-Jane nods like she’s taking notes for biology class. It is impossible to shock her.

Then Steve appears out of nowhere like he’s got supersonic ears and ESP. “Since no one here seems to be working, I’m docking everyone’s pay for an extra break.” Cocoa just walks away grinning, which pisses me off. She could have stood up for us and instead she’s writing her name down at the hostess stand. She knows better than that. You have to wait for the hostess to take down your name. Besides, she never sits down to eat here. There’s a line forming as she edges past the crowd toward the cold grey Toronto night. I hand her a new takeout coffee and she just leaves, lifting the hem of her gold lamé dress over the threshold.

The lineup at the hostess stand is out the door, and the hostess is running around seating people. Steve has taken it upon himself to stand at the podium and read out the names. “Mike,” he says. No answer. “Mike. Mike Hunt,” he says firmly. “Mr. Hunt,” he tries again, “Mr. Mike Hunt.” Parents with small children look at each other uncomfortably. The
cooks in the kitchen crack up. Steve has no idea why. “MIKE HUNT,” he yells. “MIKE HUNT.” I’m laughing so hard my cheeks hurt and I have to cross my legs to keep from peeing. It’s almost worth the extra side duty. We scrape the crusty bits of dried mustard from the condiment trays and wipe the kid goober off the high chairs and booster seats and polish the utensils before the movie rush. Every once in a while someone giggles for no real reason, just while standing there scraping the relish trays. I’m still giggling when my head hits the pillow.

The police are chasing me. It’s dark, and I’m wearing my orange-and-brown uniform, except it is too short and I’m not wearing underwear and I keep trying to stretch down my skirt but it keeps riding up and feeling shorter. My section stretches out onto the street and up some stairs. I’m holding plates of fried chicken and there’s the man whose coffee I forgot and the table of six who are yelling at me to take their order but I know if I get closer they’ll grab me. I’m trying to take a plate of green beans to the table, but they’re stuck to the counter. Turning into worms under the heat lamps, they start to wriggle. They stand up and start dancing, and they’re yelling at me, “I CO UK I CO UK,” and I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say, and the heat lamps turn to strobe lights and the restaurant is like the dance floor of Katrina’s with mirror balls and drag queens. Cocoa’s looking at me like I’ve done something wrong. I can feel the shame vines creeping into my throat, sprouting leaves out my nostrils. I run down to the commissary and pull open one of the giant walk-in
freezers. I know I’ve killed someone but I don’t remember doing it. I open the freezer door and dead chickens are hanging there upside down with their feathers on, and they start to look at me, giving me the evil eye like I’ve killed them, and I know that I have even though I don’t remember doing it, and a man in a uniform fires a lightning bolt from a gun and I fall like I’m going through a trap door that trips the alarm, and I jerk back awake as I land.

We don’t really see that my dad is afraid. He’s just a carrier, and we’re all infected. He can smell rain, he says. I learn to smell it too. Dark clouds on the horizon begin to roll across the sunset, yet the air is eerily still, hot and humid. The usual noises of birds and animals have stopped, leaving only the high-pitched buzz of the crickets and cicadas. The chickens strut single file into the henhouse without being told what to do. Everyone moves slowly, except Dad. I want to help him turn off the power and lock up, but he says everyone must stay in the house. It is too dangerous. The wind picks up, making little dust devils in the driveway as we watch him from the window, turning off the power in the workshop and then the barn; we wonder if he will be struck by lightning or carried off by a tornado. He puts a padlock on the Wizard of Oz cellar doors, then comes back to the house. The wind follows him in and blows the papers around the living room before he closes and locks the door behind him.

I’m too old to cry, but my little brother and sister are crying and saying they’re scared. The big elm tree could fall on the house, Dad says. It is a giant, lopsided leviathan with muscular rough-barked limbs that reach toward our bedrooms and tickle the roof with its branches. The big elm is monstrously
sublime—a centenarian that whispers the ancient language of earth and sky. It lisps and chatters in the summer breeze and in a storm its voices howl and scream. The wind wails now, a siren song. We sit in darkness. My mom lights a kerosene lantern that casts shadows around the room. It is story time.