Good Grief: A Novel

by Lolly Winston

  “Well, food prep assistant level three, technically,” Bill says.

  I imagine that level two is dishwasher and level one is amoeba. The funny thing about rock bottom is there’s stuff underneath it. You think, This is it: I’m at the bottom now. It’s all uphill from here! Then you discover the escalator goes down one more floor to another level of bargain-basement junk.

  “I’ll need you to come in at two and do prep for a few hours,” Bill adds. “Then stay until about ten making salads and assembling dessert orders and cleaning up. You won’t make as much—no tips—but it’s very low-key.”

  I want to tell Bill that I was capable at one point in my life. I was hired out of seventy-five candidates for my PR manager job. Before that, when I was a publications manager, I edited two award-winning four-color newsletters, wrote speeches for the university president, and managed a small staff. I spoke in front of large groups and drove a stick shift in rush hour.

  “Meanwhile,” Bill says, rubbing his eyes, then his forehead, then his temples, as if he’s trying to rub something out of his head, “if you find something else—you know, a better job in town, I’ll understand. You might find something at the Chamber of Commerce, for example. Or maybe the Shakespeare festival has an opening?” He says this hopefully, as if he’s worried I might goof up as salad girl, too—maybe drizzle chocolate sauce on the romaine.

  “Thanks. This will be great in the meantime.” At least I’ll be earning something. A little cash for COBRA and Colonel Cranson.

  Bill spins around in his chair, grabs a pile of clothes off the credenza behind his desk, and hands them to me: a pair of black-and-white-checkered pants, starched white chef’s jacket, apron, and a paper toque. This seems like an excessive getup for making salads, especially since there are only two on the menu: a house salad with hearts of palm and roma tomatoes and creamy dressing with little peach-colored shrimp on top, and a Caesar.

  “This looks serious.” I take the uniform.

  “Chef Alan is very serious about his kitchen,” Bill says, rolling his eyes.

  “Well, thanks again.” I hug the bundle of clothes and carry them to the rest room, where I wedge myself into the stall and change. I emerge looking something like the man on the cover of the Cream of Wheat box. Only the chef’s hat doesn’t really want to stay on top of my curly hair. It sort of floats on my head, as though a flying saucer flew down and landed there.

  MENTORING

  15

  “How come?” Crystal whines when I call to tell her I can’t get together at our usual time on Sunday.

  “Because I need a break.”

  “From me?”

  “From you.”

  “But you’re my big sister. The rules say you’re supposed to hang out with me every Sunday.”

  “I’m sure the rules also say you’re not supposed to set your big sister’s yard on fire.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to barbecue.”

  I suppress the compulsion to slam down the phone. “We’re not going to argue about this.”

  I stretch the rotary phone’s long curly cord across the kitchen and sit at the table, reviewing the festival play schedule. Instead of being terrorized by Crystal on Sunday, I’m going to see Blithe Spirit, by Noël Coward, a comedy my mother took me to in New York when I was in grade school. I remember riding the train with her, visiting FAO Schwarz, and sipping tea at the Plaza, nibbling triangles of cinnamon toast on china plates rimmed with pink roses.

  “What about next Sunday?” Crystal asks. I hear her suck on a cigarette and wonder if her mother knows she smokes.

  “We’ll see.” I’m surprised Crystal’s pushing to get together. So far she’s seemed annoyed by our outings.

  “Uh!” she snorts indignantly. “Are you, like, ditching me?”

  “No.” Or am I? I’m not sure yet. “But you need to think about being nicer.”

  “What am I supposed to do on Sunday?” she asks. “I don’t want to, like, spend the day alone.”

  “Call your friends.”

  There’s a silence and Crystal drags on her cigarette; it occurs to me that maybe she doesn’t have any friends at school, that she’s a loner.

  “Whatever. Okay!” I’m ready to hang up, but Crystal wants to keep talking. “This girl at school, Tiffanie, has the same shirt as me? She says I have to take mine back.”

  Maybe there are girls in Crystal’s junior high who are meaner than she is. Something tells me the other kids don’t appreciate Crystal’s wry sense of humor or pretty features or chutzpah. They probably just see her as a spooky girl who lives in a strange pink house.

  “Listen,” I tell her. “Here’s what I want you to do on Sunday. Start a journal. Get a notebook and write about that girl. Write about anything you want for half an hour.” Maybe Dr. Rupert’s tricks will help Crystal, too.

  “What are you, like, my teacher now?”

  “No, I’m just making a suggestion.”

  “Are you going to read it?”

  “Nope. It’s for you. To help you feel better.”

  “I don’t feel bad.”

  “Okay. Well, just try it.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I gotta go now, okay?”

  “Okay.” But she stalls and keeps talking, and I let her rattle on a bit. Maybe she’s being manipulative, but now I feel guilty for breaking our date. I know about those long weekends when you’re an only child. In grade school, I’d often talk Leslie Bennington—an aloof blonde who stood next to me in choir—into sleeping over. She had an arsenal of siblings and didn’t really need me but liked to stay over because my mother served unlimited heaps of Tater Tots and let us stay up to watch Laverne & Shirley. When it was time for Leslie to go home, I’d hide a piece of her clothing to stall her departure, hoping she’d stick around to play one more game of Trouble or practice a duet on the piano.

  “And so like—” Crystal is about to launch into another diatribe about the two bully girls in her class, Amber and Tiffanie, but I tell her that I have things to do and firmly say good-bye.

  Ruth can’t make the play, and I’m not crazy about going to the theater alone, but I’d rather go alone than miss the show. This is my least favorite thing about being thirty-six and single—when your only choice is to hit movies and restaurants alone or stay home with your Lean Cuisine and remote control. You tell yourself you should appreciate this “me time.” You take a bubble bath, just as the magazines tell you to, then curl up with one of the books you’ve been meaning to read, reminding yourself: This is relaxing! But you can’t concentrate. Your brain skitters around like a squirrel in the road, wondering: Will I ever find someone? Will I ever get to watch a daughter or son walk down the aisle? Will I even have a date this New Year’s Eve?

  On Sunday, I decide to have lunch at the deli on East Main Street before the matinee.

  It’s hard to know where to look when you’re eating alone in a restaurant. Do you focus on your salad or glance eye level at the empty space above the chair across the table? I choose the latter, trying to muster a cheerful look that says, I don’t mind this.

  I spot Sandy, my grief group counselor, and his wife, sitting side by side in a booth across the room. They’re cuddling and laughing. I think of how Sandy said there are two kinds of loneliness: intimate, when you’re cut off from physical contact, and social, when you’re cut off from people. He said most widows suffer from both. His wife’s black hair is cut short, revealing small, pretty ears. Her belly swells against the edge of the table, pregnant with another baby. Sandy laughs and she wrinkles her nose. I feel shy and don’t want to say hello. I duck my head, turn, and stare through the rain-flecked window at the street, my turkey sandwich tasting bland and stringy. Still, I finish the whole thing and all of the French fries, chewing and swallowing without pleasure, filling in the fifty minutes before the play. Then I order a piece of peach pie to go and eat it in the car, listening to the rain drum the roof.

  Anyone else would be t
hrilled with my seat at the theater: tenth row center. But I’ve always been a little claustrophobic, and I don’t like being wedged in the middle of the audience. If Ethan and I were trapped in a full elevator, I’d press his hand for comfort, concentrating on the warm, padded flesh and network of little bones. I count the theater seats to the exits and find that I’m equally far from both doors—a narrow passageway of feet and purses between my seat and the aisles.

  I squeeze my pocketbook, locating the bottle of tranquilizers through the leather. Should I swallow one dry pill in the middle of the theater? I’d rather not rely on the medication. Besides, I don’t want to end up chewing through half the bottle and collapsing into someone’s lap, like at Le Petit Bistro. I concentrate on breathing instead, counting and twisting my playbill into a tube. My turtleneck feels tight against my neck. A scratchy tickle flutters in the back of my throat. It’s probably only a cough. But what if it’s a scream?

  In elementary school, one of the mothers screamed during a piano recital in the middle of Eva Cross’s performance of a Chopin prelude. The woman stood up, her camel’s-hair coat forming an A shape around her, screeched like a pterodactyl, then clutched her perfectly curled black hair. We all watched as her husband put his arm around his wife and led her out of the auditorium. The funny thing is, Eva kept playing, and her dour A-Minor Prelude became a sound track for the outburst.

  Finally the theater lights dim, cloaking the audience in darkness. A hushed wave of throats clearing and cough drop wrappers rustling crosses the theater. Yellow stage lights slowly dawn. Then the play explodes into heat, light, and laughter, making the audience’s faces glow golden. The uneasy tickle in my throat vanishes.

  I remember the time Mother and I saw this play in New York and we snuggled together in the dark theater, laughing and eating linty butterscotch LifeSavers from her purse. If Crystal were better behaved, I could have brought her to the play. Then again, if she were better behaved, she probably wouldn’t need a big sister.

  A good-looking man in a velvet smoking jacket glides onstage. The husband, Charles. The shrimp scampi actor from the restaurant. I slide down in my seat. He’s movie-star handsome—a cleft chin and high forehead swept with a boyish fop of brown hair. The audience adores his caustic comebacks and witty repartee.

  Dry martinis, fringed lamps, grand piano, constant fun. I want to climb inside the play and live there. Wake up every morning in a drawing room comedy, with the jolly b-r-r-r-ing! of the doorbell and telephone—visitors always stopping by, laughter always bellowing through the house.

  The audience howls around me. I’m no longer at the theater alone; we all seem to have one set of laughing lungs and clapping hands, one joyous pulse.

  I wish I hadn’t dropped that theater class in college. But it was so silly: Everybody be a tree! Everybody be a color! Be green! Still, when Charles leaves I want to follow him through the door of the set and into the bowels of the dark, warm theater and out to the cast party, where I’m sure the actors will laugh and sing until dawn.

  16

  I’m leaning against my workstation at Le Petit Bistro—a long stainless steel counter with a sink at one end that’s as big as a car trunk—deveining a mound of shrimp and daydreaming about the handsome scampi actor in Blithe Spirit, when a sticky hand creeps up the back of my neck. Chef Alan. I flinch, banging my shin against the shelf under the counter. I smell his oniony breath, see the tips of his black clogs behind me, flecked with butter and brown gravy.

  “Relax.” He chuckles, twisting and pulling the hair on the back of my neck as he massages. “You’re so tense.”

  My shin burns and Chef’s little white towel tickles my shoulder. He always clutches it to hide where his right ring and pinky fingers are lopped off just above the knuckles. The dishwasher says Chef used to work at a big restaurant in New York City and one busy night he sliced off two fingers while hurrying to cut more prime rib. Supposedly Chef screamed and sobbed and smashed dishes, then served a plate of meat with blood on it—his blood—and got fired. Now, his rubbery nubs prod my shoulders.

  “Cool it,” I grumble, twisting away from him. “There are laws, you know.”

  Chef stiffens, shifts into bitch mode. He dunks a giant pair of tongs into the sink, plucking out a piece of lettuce that I’ve got soaking in ice water. “No good!” he barks, waving the lettuce in the air like a flag. There’s a black spot on the leaf.

  Maybe the only way I’ll ever achieve career serenity is to become my own boss. I pull a stringy brown strand from the fleshy center of a shrimp.

  “Smaller batches ensure better quality.” Chef flings the offending lettuce into the trash. “Maybe they didn’t care about quality where you used to work.”

  Chef doesn’t know that this is my first restaurant job. He seems to think I’ve always worked at a restaurant. I cross my arms, which are chronically sticky from digging into the big vats of vanilla ice cream for à la mode scoops.

  “This is not Pizza Hut,” he adds. “This is not Red Lobster. This restaurant is a destination.” His skin is as oily and pockmarked as the broiled cheese on the onion soup.

  “Okay, Alan.” I leave the shrimp and begin sorting through the lettuce, the cold water in the sink making my hands ache.

  “Chef Alan,” he says, snapping his towel in the air.

  “Okay, Chef.” I consider how this job will look on my résumé. I’ll probably have to leave it off. A hole in my life requiring explanation.

  One day the baker at Le Petit Bistro, who works mornings preparing the desserts, walks out on Chef after an argument. I arrive at work in time to find her storming down the back steps of the restaurant, the layer of a chocolate cake sailing through the air after her like a Frisbee. It lands in the parking lot near my feet.

  “I don’t need this bullshit,” she says, throwing her apron toward the back door and climbing into her car.

  “I know,” I tell her, picking up the cake.

  Inside, Chef hands me a black binder of recipes. “You’ll need to come in two hours earlier to prepare these. I’ll give you a raise.” He stomps into his office and slams the door, leaving me in peace.

  I like the solitude in the kitchen. No specials to memorize or stubborn bottles of wine to open. No meetings or media calls. Within a week I learn to bake all of the desserts in the binder: chocolate rum cake, raspberry crème brûlée, carrot cake, cheesecake, marionberry pie.

  Puttering with an old set of frosting bags with curious tubes and nozzles, I take my time icing and decorating the cakes. Chef says why bother, since the customers see them only a slice at a time. I wish I worked at a real bakery, where people would appreciate customized cakes. There’s something satisfying about perfecting iced pink roses. I’d rather glaze a crème brûlée than coach a company CEO for a TV interview—worrying about how to fix his wandering comb-over without offending him.

  After mastering the desserts, I invent a grapefruit avocado salad with curry-citrus dressing. Chef pronounces it “tangy and complex” and adds it to the menu. Next I improvise with the cheesecake recipe, creating a savory version with blue cheese and Brie. My first attempt is too runny, the second too crumbly. By the third try I come up with a smooth pie that tastes wonderful with a glass of Cabernet. Upon sampling it, Chef closes his eyes, smacks his lips, and then adds it to the menu as well.

  After work I usually take a long hot bath, then crawl into bed with cookbooks piled around me. Their weight is almost as heavy as a lover’s limbs. As I flip through the batter-splotched pages, I imagine completing each step of the recipes until I begin to feel sleepy.

  The restaurant is closed on Mondays, when the theater’s dark. Tuesdays are slow, typically just a meek crowd ordering French onion soup. These are my two days off, my weekend. At home, the hours drone by, marked by the gong of the grandfather clock and the relentless clanking of the radiators, which are always having noisy tantrums. I’d like to round them up and send them to an anger management class. I clean and shop and we
ed and launder and walk and read and nap, and by four in the afternoon, I’m ready to iron washcloths or tear down walls.

  I try to work on my laptop computer, but the thing keeps crashing, as though boycotting Colonel Cranson’s. I want to e-mail Dad, write a letter to Marion, and search online for a Gore-Tex raincoat. In fact, I could use an entire Gore-Tex wardrobe to ward off this beastly Oregon rain. I’d order Gore-Tex underwear if my damn machine would just cooperate. As it freezes for the third time, I cry and pound my fists on the dining room table. I want Ethan here to fix the thing. He had a way of showing electronic devices who’s boss. I give the computer a little shake, as though it’s a pinball machine, probably damaging its innards. I snap the lid shut and yank the plug from the wall. Worthless piece of junk! I curse myself for depending upon my husband for all things technological. But there were tasks Ethan relied on me for, albeit simple stuff. Refolding road maps. Carving a turkey. “You,” he’d say, rocking back and forth nervously and pointing at the roasting pan. And I always fixed his swim goggles. It was easy, but I didn’t want to show him how. I liked having this one trick that my highly capable engineer husband depended upon me for.

  Some afternoons I practice my crossovers at the ice-skating rink in the park in town, circling on the jagged ice, teenagers shrieking and whipping past me. I drag Ruth to see every play at the festival, the characters’ woes helping to diminish my own. Henry V may fit into all of his pants, but he’s got to worry about conquering France, plus those three creepy guys who are plotting to kill him.

  During my Crystal moratorium, she shows up at my house one Monday afternoon. I answer the door to find her slouching on the front porch, her bulging backpack pitching her to one side.

  “Wanna hang out?” she asks. The air is moist and musky. Behind her, the street shines with rain.

  “We’re taking a break, remember?” I fold my arms across my chest. This is me, enforcing boundaries.