by Lois Ruby
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Pig-Out Inn
Lois Ruby
For Benjamin, Aviva and Kalervo
ONE
Of course, Pig-Out Inn wasn’t what it said on the neon sign out front. Klondike Cafe and Cottages was the name. Momma looked up the whole case history of this place before we made our down payment. She went down to the Spinner Town Hall, where no one had looked up anything in probably twenty years, and the town clerk was just thrilled. She gave Momma a pile of yellowed papers. We found out that the buildings went up the summer of ’54, when it never fell below 100° for twenty-nine consecutive days. So the Klondike name must have been a joke of the carpenters.
The first time I walked into the diner and saw the flouncy pink curtains and the overstuffed, lopsided hot pink booths, I thought it looked like a place where the Three Little Pigs would have supper. I was hooked. I picked up a gummy, dog-eared menu, scratched out KLONDIKE, and wrote in its place PIG-OUT INN. I happen to be a world class pig lover. I’ve got stuffed, glass, wooden, pewter, plastic, and paper pigs of all persuasions. I even have a hand-knitted pig, and a purple one that’s big enough for a nursery school kid to ride.
As soon as we moved into the Pig-Out Inn I started decorating the shelves and walls and booths with my personal collection. On every wall there was a poster of a pair of pigs caressing each other’s snouts, or pigs rolling in the mud, or pigs holding cloven hoofs and dancing with big pink bows on their curlicues. Johnny, our cook, said it was all disgusting, but there was no question, when the customers started coming in, that this was pig country, and that they were lunching at the Pig-Out Inn.
That’s what we called it, from the first day on, in our restaurant family. The family includes my mother, my father (who services computer hardware), and Johnny (who isn’t a relative, but is the one professional, since he once took a course in hotel and restaurant management at Butler County Community College). And me.
I am Dovi Chandler, age fourteen. If Dovi seems like an odd name, it’s an improvement over what my mother first had in mind: Dove-of-Peace Chandler. My parents are half-baked Quakers (officially called Friends), but even for Quakers, my father said, Dove-of-Peace was carrying things too far. He thought Dovi would be quite enough to make the statement.
The name confused my teachers. My first-grade teacher in Kansas City insisted on pronouncing it Dough-Vee. By third grade, in Salina, I was called Duv. I had a teacher in Dallas who insisted on the European pronunciation, Duh-vee, which she invented. By the time I hit eighth grade in Wichita I insisted on the original, but it’s a stupid name and I’ll probably change it if I ever move to New York. Dominique. How does that sound?
We move around a lot. We’re restless people. My parents met at Friends University in Wichita and were married before they got their bachelor’s degrees. I wasn’t too alert yet, but I heard we managed an apartment house near the campus, in exchange for free rent. But my mother kept forgetting to collect the rent from the tenants, and my father didn’t know much about plumbing (who does?), so he went to work for NCR, National Cash Register, learning computer hardware.
Then my mother heard she could get a Tupperware distributorship in Kansas City, and she’d supervise a whole flock of eager saleswomen. She learned to burp Tupperware to get all the air out of the lettuce crisper and so forth, but she never learned to love Tupperware. Then she got wind of a venture in Salina, a bookstore that was going broke. It came with a cozy building—an old house with a fireplace—and a complete inventory of books. All it needed (the owners said) was fresh capital and some sound management.
Well, we didn’t know much about capital, except what we could borrow, or management either, but my mother sure knew books, and we all read a lot, so we loaded everything we owned into the station wagon and drove to Salina. We lived above the bookstore. The only problem was, I don’t think anyone in Salina read, or at least read things that didn’t come in paperback from the grocery store, and we ended up having to sell the station wagon along with the bookstore.
Dad has a great talent for computer hardware, and he can always find a job. So the next stop was Dallas, where Dad went to work for IBM, and Momma learned to make beeswax candles in a little shop next to Neiman-Marcus, which is a very fancy department store. Momma liked the beeswax, but she couldn’t tolerate the customers from Neiman’s, and she wasn’t sure that beeswax did much for the human condition anyway, so at the end of the school year we went back to Wichita and NCR.
I was thirteen, not quite obese, but far from scrawny. Tacos and fries were my downfall. Momma and I ate out a lot while my father was on the road fixing computers. We were in a mom-and-pop restaurant on Twenty-first Street in Wichita, slicing through a bowl of heavy-duty chili, when my mother said, “You know, Dovi, it wouldn’t take much to run a place like this.”
I glanced over at Mom and Pop. Pop had a bald head glistening with sweat as he hovered over the steam table; Mom had purple varicose veins, and she shuffled from table to table, filling sugar dispensers.
“A few decent recipes, a consistent method of ordering supplies,” my mother said, “a little imagination. Oh, and plenty of change in the cash register. We’ll have to remember to get rolls of nickels and dimes and pennies from the bank.”
“Are you telling me we’re going into the restaurant business?” I asked, not a bit surprised.
“Hmmm … You remember Johnny, don’t you?” Pop came and refilled our iced tea. His apron was splattered with gravy. Mom shuffled to the phone, which Pop didn’t even seem to hear.
“Six A.M.,” she barked. “Eight P.M. Well, what time did you want to eat?” She slammed the receiver down.
“Johnny Buttons, from the apartment complex. Do you remember him, Dovi? He was the one with the brown Brillo-Pad hair, the one who never paid his utility bills, and then had a fit when they cut off his lights, remember?”
“Sort of.”
“He went over to El Dorado for a restaurant course. I think I’ll just give Johnny a call.” She pushed back her chair, which scraped across the worn wooden floor.
“Can it wait till we get home?” I asked. Pop was slapping the Venetian blinds shut and glaring at the clock every time we looked in his direction.
“Oh, certainly,” Momma said. Her head was spinning, and I read the familiar signs clearly.
Goodbye Wichita, goodbye hanging around Towne East Square, goodbye air-conditioned apartment, goodbye two years in a row at the same school, goodbye friends. I knew we’d be in the restaurant business by summer.
Sure enough, as soon as school was out, I slammed shut the yearbook that all my friends had signed (See you next year, and don’t sweat too hard all summer, Love, Dorrie … To the smartest girl in school. I like you even though you get A’s in algebra, ha ha ha! Love ya, Maria). I closed my eyes to try to forget their faces. Already I couldn’t remember whether Maria had blue or brown eyes. I probably wouldn’t ever open the yearbook again. Besides, next year I’d have a Spinner High School yearbook to pile on top of the others.
TWO
While we were waiting for the Pig-Out Inn to fall into our hands, Momma and Dad discussed details. “We’ll order white nylon uniforms,” Momma said, but eying me with a frown, she changed her mind. “No, white isn’t Dovi’s color. How about pink, to match the curtains?”
“Listen, guys,” I said, “why don’t we just wear jeans with whatever we’ve got on, on top?”
Momma shook her head. “It wouldn’t look professional.”
“But it would be cheap,” Dad reminded her.
“Well …” Momma began, weakeni
ng slightly. “Maybe jeans and a white shirt. Oh, and a cute red cowboy hankie tied around our necks.”
“I’m glad I don’t have to dress up that way,” my father said, laughing, “like a rodeo dropout.”
“Oh, Mike, you’re such a stickin-the-mud.” Momma stood on her tiptoes to kiss Dad’s neck. “You’ll love the restaurant business, I just know it.” Momma flirted and pouted, but Dad stood firm for once.
“I’m never giving up NCR again. We need some steady income while you’re blowing our money out here, Marilyn.”
So we agreed to let Dad stay in a rooming house in Wichita and come out to Spinner every so often on the weekends. He didn’t really think we’d be in Spinner too long before we lost our shirts and our neckerchiefs.
“I am inordinately fond of uniforms,” Momma said dreamily. “But you’re right, I guess. Dovi would look better in jeans.”
Uniforms are one thing, but clothes in general mean nothing to Momma, maybe because she’s the sort of lady who looks terrific in anything. I’ve seen pictures of her when miniskirts were in, and she looked like a darling little plaything. Then, when long skirts were the fashion, she’d make a point of spinning around and having the bottom of the skirt swish around her, like it was late in catching up. She could also look sophisticated and businesslike when she had to in a gray flannel suit, like the day she went for the reading of my grandfather’s will. Incidentally, he left her a few thousand dollars, which is what we used for the down payment on the Pig-Out.
Jeans? Oh, Momma’s a knockout in jeans, with her tight little hind end and long cowgirl legs. She isn’t that tall, but she’s all legs. People look at her, then at me, and figure I’m adopted.
My hair is lighter than Momma’s by three shades on the Miss Clairol chart, and you’d think my pants were leaded the way everything seems to sink to the bottom. Elsewhere, the news is better. I look pretty good in a sweater—meaty, but not jiggly. Where other girls pride themselves on a flat belly or silky hair or a dainty pair of ankles, I’ve always thought that my most gorgeous feature is my hands. I’ve got naturally perfect nails, which comes from lots of homogenized milk and Jell-O, and I’ve got these long fingers that I tend to curl in toward my thumb to emphasize a point.
My hands are so extraordinary that my sixth-grade teacher picked me to sign the whole Christmas pageant, even though I didn’t know a word of sign at that point and two other sixth graders did, including a deaf one. In fact, while I’m laying it on so thick, I’ll just mention that my mother heard about this modeling agency up in Omaha that’s looking for hands for jewelry commercials, and she sent them pictures of my disembodied hands. But no word’s come back yet.
As for the rest of me—well, I have the usual number of eyes and lips and so forth on my face, arranged in the customary pattern. I’m not pretty, except to my grandmothers, and I’m not a fright either, though my green eyes fire up when I’m furious, and I take on what my father calls my dragon demeanor.
I am much too fiery to be even a half-baked Quaker, but we’re all hoping that maturity will help. Hoping, but not holding our breath.
Johnny is not a Quaker. He’s what my father calls a lapsed Methodist, which means he hasn’t been to church in twenty-five years, but if he had gone in all that time, it would have been to a Methodist church, probably. Johnny is a blustery tyrant but, underneath it all, a pretty good man. Johnny is not a good cook, however.
That was our first surprise when we opened the Pig-Out. Sure, Johnny studied about how to select cantaloupes at Butler County Community College, and how to design cute menus, and how to apply for a liquor license, but he never quite learned to cook.
“What the hey are you supposed to do with these slickies?” he asked, squishing five pounds of stewed tomatoes around in his hands.
“With a little of this, and a little of that,” Momma explained patiently, “they will magically turn into spaghetti sauce.”
Momma wasn’t much of a cook either. But we had the famous Betty Crocker cookbook, and our first lesson was from the section “Cooking for Crowds.” I read aloud, Momma chopped and measured things, and Johnny performed the final artistic steps, such as moving the ten-gallon pots from the counter to the stove. Our first creation was a nine-pound gristly mess of chili that we put in the refrigerator and scraped three inches of grease off of the next morning. Then Betty Crocker told us how to bleed off the grease while it was still hot so that, voilà! we could serve Johnny’s chili same-day fresh.
Truckers like chili; chili, chicken-fried steak, pork tenderloin, and hamburgers. Johnny, of course, hadn’t ever cooked any of these, but Momma said, “Truck drivers are the salt of the earth. Let’s feed them what they like best, because the whole country depends on them to get goods from one point to another, and nobody, nobody can drive with indigestion.”
We quickly got to know the regular customers, who’d seen probably six owners of the Klondike and were now training the world’s first Pig-Out Inn owners.
There was Palmer, from the gas station across the street, whose wife was known as the worst cook in Wellington County. The other interesting thing about Palmer was that he had absolutely no sense of humor. None. Then there was Emile Joe Hunter, a trucker for P.I.E. who couldn’t digest raw vegetables because of some operation he’d had once to lose weight, but it obviously hadn’t done any good.
Emile Joe would get insulted when Johnny accidentally put lettuce on his sandwich, as if we were trying to poison him. “I’m never stopping here again,” he’d bark, and his jowls would shake just like a bulldog’s. “Cook ought to be able to remember a simple thing like hold the lettuce.” But Emile Joe would come back time after time, because truck drivers have a real feeling for tradition, and the Pig-Out was like home to them.
Another regular was Pap Morgan, and every couple of days a man named Pawnee—maybe he was an Indian—stopped in and dumped a few complaints on us. Barbara and Bill Wanamaker, who shared the driving, would drop in for a cold drink or hot coffee now and then, and they’d bring in their sweaty baby in one of those pink plastic carriers that looked like a serving tray. They didn’t eat much at our place because they were out to make a quick killing on the road before the baby got too big.
Here’s how a typical on-the-job training session would go:
“The coffee’s got to be thick as mud. You got to be able to taste the caffeine,” Bill Wanamaker told us. Like most truckers, Bill’s left arm was a lot darker than his right. His right arm had a tic-tac-toe board tattoed on it, maybe that’s how he and Barbara passed the hours on the road. “If you don’t keep the coffee strong we’re gonna be asleep at the wheel, and it’s gonna make a bloody mess on the highway.”
“Hey, all you and your wife are hauling is peaches,” Pawnee said, “How ’bout if I splattered my load over the highway—dead sheep lying all over the place? The highway patrol would have to send out a crane to get those babies up off the highway before they started to smell.”
“Aw, come on, Pawnee,” Barbara Wanamaker moaned from a back booth. She was nursing the baby and had her back to us. She had pretty sun-bleached hair to her shoulders and jeans so tight that I wondered how she could bend her legs. “You’re not going to kill a whole load of three-hundred-pound sheep with one crash.”
“Could,” Pawnee said defensively. “It’s up to Dovi here. You keep that coffee fresh and hot and thick.”
“And tell that cook you’ve got back there,” Emile Joe said, “that it turns my stomach when he fries the hot cakes after the bacon. It repeats on me all the way to St. Louis, so I’m always chewing Tums. Oh, and be sure to stock plenty of Tums, unless the cook’s gonna improve a whole lot in the next few weeks.”
“What’s he talking about with the bacon grease?” Pap Morgan said. “I’ll tell you what’s missing from your menu.” He pulled one out from behind the ketchup bottle, flipped it open, and pointed to a blank spot. I tried to read what wasn’t there, upside down. “Biscuits and red-eye gravy, that’s what’s
missing.”
I didn’t like the sound of it, but there was this sign on the wall that proclaimed “The Two Rules of Business,” and it said,
1. The customer is always right.
2. If the customer is wrong, refer to Rule 1. So I asked about red-eye gravy.
“Simple,” Pap Morgan explained. “You fry up the bacon in a big black skillet. You never, ever wash out a cast iron skillet. Just scrape it out with paper towels. So, you fry up the bacon, then you pour a little flour into the grease after the bacon’s out, and you mix it up good to thicken it, and while it’s piping hot you pour it over fresh biscuits. It’s out of this world. Hangs in the gut for the whole trip, too.”
“Why’s it called red-eye?” I asked.
“Plain and simple, it’s the bacon flecks that look like your standard bloodshot eye. Best stuff I ever put my tongue to.”
We penciled it in on the menus, and it was a hit. I tasted just the tip of a spoonful of it once and gagged.
THREE
The first few weeks in the restaurant business were tough but not hard, as I used to say about the times tables in fourth grade. I think fourth grade was in Chillicothe, Missouri, but I may be wrong on that.
Well, the point is, we had good teachers and learned pretty fast how to run a place like the Pig-Out, which is why we weren’t blown right out of the water on our second Saturday, when the Army landed.
At eleven o’clock that morning a convoy of three trucks pulled up into our parking lot and dumped out thirty-two khaki-clad men. All of them were hungry and wanted hamburgers and shakes. All of them also wanted the key to the men’s room.
“Forty-eight burgers, Johnny,” I yelled into the pass-through window. “Six well, fourteen medium, twenty-three medium rare, and five still breathing.”
I heard Johnny muttering to himself back there. “Slap the burgers on the grill, Johnny.” Plop, plop, plop; a row of flat little pellets dropped onto the sizzling grill. “Grease the buns, Johnny,” he reminded himself. “Buns. Holy shee, Marilyn, who expected the whole U.S. Army?”
