by Julia Pandl
Amy finally arrived with my chef clothes and took me to the employee bathroom to change. She kicked open the door and disappeared behind a wall of smoke before I got the chance to ask her about Dad’s twitch. I followed. Waitresses stood before cloudy mirrors, pulling up skirts and nylons, tidying aprons, corralling hair by using bobby pin after bobby pin and gallons of Aqua Net. Cigarettes dangled from every lower lip. This was the dressing room, the inner sanctum. I was part of the club now, dressing among restaurant legends whose names I’d heard around the kitchen table—Margie, Marlene, Bernice, Gail, Sue, Geri, Willie, Lillie—names that commanded George’s respect and therefore mine.
In short, these women were the front line. They took all the shit. This was their foxhole, and I had climbed in.
Don’t cough, don’t cough, I thought, trying to breathe with all that smoke, or they’ll never let you back in. It was bad enough being the boss’s kid—we were all marked—but I was the baby, soft and spoiled. Many of these women had been in that bathroom since before I was born. They had crust; I only had puncture wounds. Their chops, taut and sinewy, had been tested in some of the ugliest shifts in the industry: Easter Sunday, Father’s Day, and the dreaded Mother’s Day. My chops still had baby fat.
They watched me as I dressed, one eye closed behind tendrils of smoke, the other sizing me up.
Nothing fit quite right. The chef pants were too tight, squeezing my linebacker thighs, and way too long. And the chef coat, bright and crisp from the laundry, could have doubled as a shelter for a family of five. It was double-breasted, though, very cheflike. The size didn’t matter. I loved the way it felt, buttoning one side over the other. I slid a brand-new bib apron over my head, folded it a few times, and tied it tight around my tummy.
The only thing missing was the hat. Headgear in most restaurants is much like the headgear in the Catholic church—each hat represents a distinction in the hierarchy. Tall chef hats, short chef hats, chef caps, baker’s caps, baseball caps, bandannas, and hairnets usually indicate a person’s position in the kitchen. We didn’t stick to those formalities. George, being the leader, had a tall, white pleated paper hat. Everyone else, no matter where on the food chain, wore bandannas or baseball caps adorned with the restaurant’s logo. I opted for the bandanna. The bandanna said you were tough enough to handle whatever the ride threw at you.
I looked in the mirror, turning this way and that, smoothing the outfit around my sides. Yes, I was the real deal.
MY FATHER SERVED the brunch from behind a giant chafing dish on wheels. We called it the eighteen-wheeler. Every Sunday it was rolled it to its designated spot in the dining room and plugged it in to an outlet. Stainless-steel pans filled with bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, tenderloin tips, egg noodles, and the beloved whitefish sat elevated above simmering water and underneath three heat lamps. It was parked directly across from the pancake station. Next to the eighteen-wheeler stood a table covered and skirted with white linen. This was where the brunch-goers picked up their plates from under another heat lamp.
Amy gave me a quick lesson in the art of pancake making. Honestly, it was a snap. I wielded a swift spatula. My practice cakes were light, fluffy, and done to golden perfection. As customers approached, I asked them, “Blueberry or plain?” Simple.
George stood across from me, fidgeting with the serving pieces, placing them just so, running his hand along the stacks of plates every thirty seconds to make sure they were hot, and clicking a set of tongs with such rapid fire that they sounded like the camera shutters of a thousand paparazzi. Click-click-click, as if he were keeping time to some sort of schizophrenic beat in his brain. The twitch, and the big vein pulsing just above his glassy left eye, fell into perfect rhythm: Click-click-click-click, twitch, bulge; click-click-click-click, twitch, bulge. As I poured batter, blueberry or plain, onto the griddle, I wondered if this thing of his had a diagnosis. One of my brothers—Jeremiah, I think—had let me watch The Exorcist, and it looked to me like George and Linda Blair had the same problem.
Nothing stopped the brunch, though, not even demonic possession. I plodded along. It turned out that “doing pancakes” was fun for exactly six minutes. It’s not that tough to get them right, again and again. There’s a book out there about a guy who goes to heaven and plays so much golf that eventually he gets a hole in one every time he steps up to the tee. Perfection begets boredom. Talk to anyone at a cocktail party who got a 1600 on his or her SATs. That’s what “doing pancakes” was like, minus the sense of superiority.
Outside, the temperature was a sweltering 95. The air-conditioning in the dining room didn’t stand a chance against the steady tropical hiss excreted by the pancake batter, bubbling on a greasy griddle. It had to be 112 degrees where I was standing. It felt like I was on the equator. Everything stuck to everything. And my underpants, thick with humidity, had become an issue. Each bathroom break became a tricky twenty-minute battle between hurried hands, a fleshy bottom, and sticky, tangled cotton.
Because it had become so unbearably hot, I decided to keep a tall glass of ice water on the ledge next to me. It seemed like a good idea, it really did. I had just finished with a rush of pancake lovers. A thin river of sweat rolled down the middle of my training bra. My clothes felt fused to my body. I lifted my glass, the icy water just about to pour across my lips—
Then I realized that, across the room, George was watching me. My heart kicked up as if it were clothespinned to a bicycle spoke. Instinct told me I was about to be killed: death by tongs in front of three hundred brunch-goers.
He walked slowly toward me, the tongs, the twitch, the vein. Click-click-click-click, twitch, bulge. Click-click-click-click, twitch bulge.
He stopped in front of the griddle, gestured to my glass with his tongs. He leaned over and whispered, in a gravelly voice sounding just like Linda Blair’s, “Never, never eat or drink anything, ever, ever, in front of the customers.”
His admonition set my lip quivering. Who the hell was this guy, and how did he get to be so mean? Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I told myself while I held my breath and squeezed back tears, and his look bored a hole in my psyche. Jesus, please help me, I prayed.
Then my father turned and walked away, the tong punishment avoided. It was a miracle—small, but a miracle nonetheless. Jesus saved.
A little while later, lips white with dehydration, I retreated to the kitchen, out of sight, to get a drink. Once there, I also realized I was starving. Oddly, you don’t eat much when you work in a restaurant. If you do get to eat at all, it happens on the run. I spied a plate piled high with breakfast sausage, fresh out of the oven, glistening under the heat lamps on the cooks’ line.
I listened for the tongs. Nothing; the coast was clear.
I pinched one sausage off the pile and tossed it from one hand to the other as I headed back to my pancake post.
We’ve all done it, taken a bite of hot, greasy pizza and burned the hell out of the roof of our mouths. The only difference with a sausage is that it’s not just the roof that gets it: your entire mouth—tongue, cheeks, and chin—are instantly awash in hot, sticky liquid. The thing seemed to have life of its own, and the harder I tried to swallow, the hotter my mouth got. The sausage defied every attempt at consumption
A line was forming at the pancake griddle. Shit. Shit. Shit. For some reason, instead of saying, “Throw it away,” instinct said, “Hide it.” Sunday brunches come with messy waitress trays by the dozen, everywhere, piled high with china, glasses, and flatware used in multiples by customers visiting the buffet two, three, and four times. Not that day, though; certainly not that moment. Thoughts raced through my head: Throw it against the wall; throw it on the floor; hide it, hide it, hide it, somewhere, quick. My father’s warning flashed through my panicked mind: Never, never, eat or drink anything, ever, ever in front of the customers.
Then I had an “aha!” moment. At twelve, instinct is underdeveloped. Foolish. You do crazy things, things you wouldn’t do at perh
aps . . . thirteen. I looked down, pried open the right pocket of my beloved chef pants, and squeezed the sausage in.
In a panic, certain things just don’t occur to you, like, say, for example, the fact that something hot in your mouth is just as likely to be hot in your pocket. Chef pants are supposed to be heat resistant, but they don’t say how resistant. They don’t come with a warning that reads: “Not to be used as a hiding place for breakfast sausage, stupid.” It took a moment for the hot grease to soak through the cotton pocket and into the skin across my thigh. I let out an imperceptible little whine as I stepped behind the pancake station. I debated, but knew I couldn’t take the sausage out. Those customers, waiting for their pancakes, would tell. My stomach churned. Tiny sweat beads clawed their way through the tight skin on my forehead and upper lip. The customers’ faces wobbled before me, like they were staring at me from a fun house mirror, shrieking, laughing, and pointing. They knew. They would tell on me. And I’d be left alone to face the look, the vein, the twitch, and the tongs. It would mean shame for me and disappointment for my father. That sausage was an indelible black mark, my ticket back to the pickle bucket, back to the parking lot. After finally making the team, I’d be taking myself out of the game, just like that.
No, I decided, I couldn’t let that happen. Some decisions we make and some are made for us. Either way, life leaves its little mark, defining us, before and after. I crossed over that day. I decided. I played through the pain, asking each customer with a whimper, “Blueberry or plain?”
2
Moving Days
We moved from Milwaukee to Cedar Grove in 1981, the summer between my fifth and sixth grades, and I took to sleeping in my parents’ bed, something I had done when I was younger. I used to tell them I had bad dreams, but actually, thanks to my overactive imagination I’d end up freaking myself out in the middle of the night. My room had been upgraded from the walk-in closet, and now the white eyelet curtains hanging over my bedroom window took shape, and the maple leaves outside whispered in the breeze off the lake. A shadow on the wall became a slightly decomposed hand, and as soon as I saw the rusty pitchfork from the garage wobble in the knotty pine wall, I tiptoed to their bedroom.
This habit grew worse after our house on Prospect was robbed a few years earlier. I awoke to a hysterical screech and saw my mother, Terry, in her nightgown, pushing my father, in his boxers, down the hall after the burglar, who was wearing a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. He had taken the screen off one of the family room windows and had wandered up to my parents’ room. When he pushed their door open, my mother thought he was just one of the kids. My father saw the man’s shadow as he stood over my mother holding a screwdriver with a sixteen-inch shaft. The man said, “Where’s your money?”
My father’s wallet, oddly full of cash, sat on the dresser not two feet away, yet neither of them thought to hand it over. Instead, thinking the burglar had walked past each of our bedrooms and murdered us on his way, my mother let out an animalistic scream and my father leaped over her, chased the intruder down the hall and the stairs, and out the window.
Today I suppose the anxiety I experienced would be called posttraumatic stress disorder, including my habit of sleeping with Terry and George. Some parents would be encouraged to employ the help of a psychotherapist. Instead, my dad decided to pay me fifty cents for every night I stayed in my own bed. It worked, and it only cost him three hundred and eighty-five bucks. You do the math.
Cedar Grove was an unwelcome and costly change for our family. We continued to lock our doors, of course, even though the nearest bad guy would have had to pick his way through forty miles of corn, alfalfa, and soybeans.
Everything else, however, was different. The schools were public, the churches reformed. There was not one Jewish person to speak of, much less a decent matzo ball soup, nor did the town have a movie theater or a department store. It had a Main Street with a variety store, a bakery, a coffee shop, a Hardware Hank, and a set of railroad tracks that stopped pickup trucks on their way to the dump. The house—cold, damp, and musty—felt much more like a cottage. The gravel drive forced us to abandon shooting hoops and hitting tennis balls against the garage. And our only neighbors, Clem and Millie, looked like they had come over on the Mayflower.
George was a little bit country—his family tree had some awfully straight lines, after all—but not Terry. She was a city girl. Anything north of the Milwaukee County line represented the end of the world to her. Beyond that there be dragons. Her history lived at 4418 North Prospect, twenty-two years of it. She had dug in, twenty-two years of neighbors, phone calls, cocktail parties, borrowed cups of sugar, kids, friendships, cuts, trips to the emergency room, report cards, fund-raisers, visits to the police department—twenty-two years of sitting at the kitchen table, the tip of her cigarette glowing at all hours of the night, waiting for my siblings to come home.
Her life took shape around those memories of the house on Prospect; my father’s, on the other hand, took shape around the restaurant. His history lived there, wading among a constant flow of cooks, bakers, dishwashers, waitstaff, bartenders, purveyors, and customers. With the move, my mother had to re-create everything anew in Cedar Grove. Dad had to re-create nothing.
In the end my father stomped his feet like a little girl and won the battle surrounding the move, but Terry was fiery Irish and stubborn German, so she never did give up the war. Johnny and Jimmy were gone. Katie, Peggy, Chrissy, Amy, and Stevie would all be in college in the fall. Five tuitions, two mortgages, and a nearly empty nest created a tipping point. Something had to give.
They struck a deal. George put the decision in her hands, stating that he would go along with whatever she wanted to do. For a few brief moments I believed we would stay in our house on Prospect Avenue, and our world would be righted after all. Whether or not she actually weighed the pros and cons remains a mystery. If I had to guess, I’d say her decision was made well before they shook on it, but I never asked, and she never said.
A week later, Terry sat at the kitchen table while my father leaned against the counter. I eavesdropped from the dining room.
“I want to stay here, George, on Prospect,” she said. “We’ve been here over twenty years. This is the home the kids know. This is the home I know.”
My father turned and stomped out the back door. Foot stomping never worked in our family, so Terry’s eventual concession left us all stunned.
UNTIL WE MOVED to Cedar Grove, and after that to Oostburg, I saw my parents as two separate entities, a mom and a dad, who were put on this earth for one purpose and one purpose only: to take care of us. Especially me. Of course, I understood that they were married, but to me, married just meant they slept in the same bed and took turns using the bathroom. The notion that they actually had a life separate from mine was as mysterious to me as high school later would be. It was a possibility, sure, but even though it was right there at the end of my nose, I didn’t see it happening. They never showed us their marriage. If they fought, we didn’t know; if they worried about money, we didn’t know; if they had differing opinions about how to discipline us, we didn’t know.
We saw a united front. Any ripples in their marriage, were, simply put, none of our business.
George’s overruling of my mother’s decision, and the subsequent move, created a ripple in our family, a little like the way the Colorado River created the Grand Canyon, only it happened overnight. It was the first time I saw my parents on opposite sides of anything, and they stayed on those sides for the next eighteen years. Occasionally, they would meet in the middle, over their first brandy Manhattan, only to retreat, lobbing insults, halfway through the second. Grudges, even when held tight to the chest, bubble up; just add booze.
Because I was eleven when all this began, my opinion was completely irrelevant. It was as simple as that. Eleven didn’t get an opinion. The chief weapon in my arsenal, foot stomping, had been stolen by my dad, so I was left with tears and pouting. Both were rende
red ineffective when my mother shouted at me to snap out of it. Going up against Terry was pathetic, like throwing stones at a rocket launcher.
I watched and sometimes tagged along as Stevie and Jeremiah spent the entire summer driving load after load of the “small stuff” to Cedar Grove, where twenty-one-inch concrete Dutch boys and girls leaned in for a kiss on every single lawn. My mother’s car, a 1977 forest green Buick Century, was loaded down repeatedly with stuff from the garage, the attic, and the wood pile from underneath the basement stairs, dragging it all north on I-43, the occasional spark spitting from the back bumper in its wake. If there was room, I sat in the backseat, where a wire poked through the vinyl binding. By the time we passed the historical marker on Sauk Trail, blood trickled down the back of my thigh.
Our family became tiny overnight. Jeremiah and I, and Luke, Jimmy’s German shepherd, were the only ones who made the move with Terry and George. Jeremiah made it through his freshman year at Cedar Grove High before my mother let him move back to Milwaukee where he could live with Jimmy and his wife, Treasie, and attend Marquette University High School. I hated him for that, plain and simple. I really did. I hated him for choosing to leave me alone with our parents. And I hated my parents for loving him more, for letting him go and forcing me to make change work.
So there you have it. Ugly, I know. The green-eyed monster had set the preadolescent pendulum in motion. The swing was nauseating for all three of us. During the day I walked along the beach, past the stagnant creek that ran like a river in springtime, toward the windmill beach. Choking back big prepubescent tears, I imagined my parents’ faces and kicked sand in their eyes. I grew fangs and shrieked insults at my mother, the slave driver, for making me clean my own bathroom. I scolded my father for forgetting to bring home CheddarWurst from the Wednesday night buffet.
Then, at night, I crawled into their bed. What are you going to do?
