Lucky Stars

by Jane Heller

  ‘This is kind of cool,” I remarked as we wound our way from Ferry Street to Terminal Way to streets with names like Tuna and Albacore and Barracuda—all home at one time to the various tuna companies. When we arrived at Fin’s on Cannery Street, we parked in their lot and walked to the front of what was an enormous, cavernous building.

  “What’s the plan here?” I said. “You don’t have an appointment, right? You’re just planning to breeze in and announce yourself and hope they’ll remember your letter to them?”

  She tapped her handbag. “I brought their letter with me. I’ll show it to the receptionist and she’ll see to it that we get the tour I was promised. If she doesn’t, I’ll have to go over her head.”

  I nodded, pitying the poor receptionist.

  “Hello,” my mother said to her. She was about my age and had a harelip. “I’ve been summoned by your director of public relations, a gentleman named Mr. Corbin Beasley, to come here and inspect your plant.”

  The receptionist gave my mother a quizzical look. “Summoned?”

  “That’s correct. It’s all in this letter.” She reached into her handbag and handed the letter over to the receptionist, who read it without enthusiasm, as if she’d seen such letters before. They were probably boilerplate responses to consumers with complaints. Just as probably, my mother was the first recipient to ever follow up on one. “So you don’t have an appointment with Mr. Beasley.” This was more of a statement of fact than a question.

  “No, but I assume he’ll make time for me. I’m one of the Fin’s consumers about whom he’s supposed to care so deeply.”

  “It’s not that he doesn’t care, Mrs.—”

  “Reiser. Helen Reiser. My daughter and I have driven almost forty-five minutes to come here this morning. We have no intention of leaving until we’re given a tour of your operation. Understood?”

  Again, I felt sorry for the receptionist She was no match for my mother, who, although not as rude as the customers as Cornucopia!, was just as pushy.

  “The thing is, he’s in the conference room with the advertising agency this morning,” she explained. “It’s an important meeting and all the executives are in there.”

  “So? They have phones in conference rooms, don’t they?” said my mother. “Call him and tell him that Helen Reiser has arrived for her tour. Oh, and be sure to add that I’m the one who nearly choked to death on the bone I found in my can of Fin’s premium solid white albacore a few weeks ago and that if he doesn’t give me the tour and prove to me that the quality control here really is up to snuff, I intend to take my case to the Better Business Bureau, not to mention Dateline.”

  The receptionist turned pale—green, to be really accurate—and picked up the phone and dialed. She had discovered what I had known since I was a child: my mother wasn’t to be messed with.

  “There’s a woman here to see Mr. Beasley,” she said to the person who picked up the phone. An underling, no doubt. “She claims she found a bone in one of our products and nearly died from it.”

  “Not ‘claims,’ ” said my mother, leaning across the receptionist’s desk so she could make her point clear. “ ‘Did.’ I did find a bone in my tuna fish and Mr. Beasley did tell me it was an aberration; that the quality control at Fin’s is top-notch. I’m here to see if he was being truthful and if not, I’ll have to inform the public.”

  We waited a few seconds, during which I considered slipping off to their ladies’ room and disappearing down the sink. Eventually, the receptionist said, “Mr. Beasley will be right with you.”

  My mother beamed as she nudged me with her elbow. “You see that, Stacey?” she whispered as we sat in the nearby visitors’ chairs. “You speak up, you get somewhere.”

  She was about to get somewhere, all right. Just not where she expected.

  eight

  After a ten-minute wait, during which my mother and I sat in the small lobby leafing through uninvolving trade journals having to do with the canned goods industry, Corbin Beasley, public relations director of Fin’s, emerged.

  “Welcome, Mrs. Reiser,” he said, extending his hand toward my mother’s. The extension, by the way, was no small matter, as Corbin, a thirtysomething with a geeky grin, was easily six foot six to my mother’s five foot two. “Great to meet you. It’s always a delight to relate to our customers on a face-to-face, one-to-one basis.”

  “Thank you,” she said briskly, indicating she had come for the inspection, not for the pleasantries. “This is my daughter, Stacey. It was her can of Fin’s that contained the bone, as a matter of fact. If I hadn’t been at her apartment that day, she could have been the one to choke and die.”

  Corbin smiled inappropriately, exposing jack-o-lantern teeth. “I’m terribly sorry you were alarmed,” he said to both of us. “But I’m here to assure you that, while bones do find their way inside the cans on occasion, your experience is not the usual course of events here at Fin’s. Not by any means.”

  “Then what is?” said my mother.

  “What’s what?” said Corbin.

  “The usual course of events here at Fin’s. That’s what I came here to investigate. I’m not one for frivolity so why don’t we get started?”

  “With?”

  “The tour. The inspection. The step-by-step look-see. In your letter you invited me to pay you a visit and check out your quality control. Since you’re such a busy man, let’s get on with it already.”

  Clearly, Corbin had been under the illusion that he could pop out of his meeting with the advertising people, shake my mother’s hand, do a little bowing and scraping, and send her on her merry way. Wrong.

  “I expect the grand tour—start to finish, stern to stern, A to Z,” she said, running out of clichés, mercifully. “I want to observe the entire process.”

  Corbin checked his watch. “I do have to get back to my meeting,” he said, “but I’d be privileged to give you a quick tour of the facilities. Follow me.”

  We followed Corbin through the lobby door, down a carpeted hall, and into his cushy office where he handed us two construction worker-type hard hats and asked us to put them on. “Everybody touring the cannery has to wear one,” he said. “It’s a safety regulation.”

  “I approve wholeheartedly,” said my mother, donning her hard hat. “Safety first.”

  I was less enthusiastic. I was anticipating a bad case of helmet hair.

  Our field trip took us outside the executive offices, across a parking lot, and out to a marina, where several large boats were being unloaded in the water.

  “These just came in,” said Corbin, pointing to the recently docked boats. “They come in every day, all day, filled with catches from local waters as well as elsewhere in the Pacific. The fish are frozen at twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit as soon as they’re caught, then they’re brought to us in storage containers.”

  “How does Fin’s know the fish on these ships is any good?” asked my mother. “You hear stories. My friend Esther ate at one of the best seafood restaurants in Cleveland—she had grilled swordfish, if memory serves. Anyhow, she got so sick she couldn’t look at fish ever again. She won’t even touch scrod now, poor soul.”

  Corbin tried to seem empathetic. “At Fin’s we’re very mindful of possible spoilage, and we take great pains to prevent it.”

  “Name one great pain that you take,” challenged my mother.

  “Well, we cut samples from eight fish out of every load, and these eight samples go straight to our lab, which I’ll show you later if you like. Our technicians test the samples for the histamine levels in the fish, which tell us if there’s been spoilage from high temperature. Then they do another test to determine the acid content in the fish, in case there’s been spoilage from low temperature. And finally they test the percentage of salt in the fish, which should be in the one-point-five to one-point-seven range. If any of the test results look the least bit suspicious, we throw the entire shipment of fish out.”

  “Good riddance,
” I said. I was bored silly, but thought I should interject a remark now and then, so they’d know I was breathing. My mother, on the other hand, was fascinated by every morsel of trivia Corbin threw at her.

  “All right, ladies, let’s move ahead to the thawing facility,” he said, leading us over to an area where rows and rows of containers held tuna—big tuna, medium tuna, small tuna, blue fin tuna, yellow fin tuna, More tuna than you’d ever want to deal with. They were stiff—dead-body stiff—and were waiting to be thawed. “See how that one’s eyes are clear, not cloudy?” Corbin had selected a rather colorful fish for his show-and-tell and was running his fingers all over it. “And see how the skin is shiny and firm, not mushy to the touch?”

  My mother leaned over and fondled the fish herself. “I do see,” she acknowledged.

  I should add here that the smell of fish was as omnipresent as it was vile. There was no question that I would have to burn the clothes I was wearing, especially the shoes, which were covered in jus de fish guts.

  “The fish will be thawed over here,” said Corbin, moving into an area with giant hoses everywhere, along with more containers of frozen tuna. “They’ll be soaked in water for five hours until the backbone temperature is thirty-five degrees. Then, our people will remove the entrails and cut the fish into chunks and cook them at two hundred and fifty degrees for forty-five minutes to four hours, depending on the size of the fish.”

  While I attempted to keep my breakfast down, Corbin walked us into yet another area. “I call this the London Fog room,” he said, gesturing into the air, which was fetid with steam haze and foul with fish fumes. “It’s sixty degrees in here and a hundred percent humidity, so the fish can cool down enough for the skin to be cut off easily.”

  “And then what happens?” asked my mother. “Because I have a feeling we’re getting to the crucial stages of the process.”

  Corbin concurred. “I’m about to take you into what is essentially our mission control.” He laughed. Even he knew how stupid this exercise was.

  He escorted us into a warehouse-type space where there were hundreds of women with plastic caps on their heads and plastic aprons over their clothes and small instruments that looked like carrot peelers in their fast-moving hands. They stood shoulder to shoulder—as close together as sardines in a can (sorry, but I’ve got smelly fish on the brain)—at a conveyor belt that ran the length of the room.

  “Look how hard they work,” my mother marveled as we passed by the women, who were chattering amongst themselves in Spanish. As I had studied the language in both high school and college and become even more proficient in it after moving to Latino-populated L.A., I understood what they were saying. (“My back is sore.” “My car needs new tires.” “My husband sings in the shower, like he thinks he’s Ricky Martin.” Nothing of consequence, in other words.)

  “They do work hard,” said Corbin. “They’re the core of our operation, the heart and soul. They skin and bone the fish—by hand, hour after hour, day after day—and place the cleaned product onto the conveyor, which carries the fish down to the canning area. Then the fish is put into the cans, either with our vegetable broth or in oil, and steam heated in an oven to kill any possible bacteria.”

  “Very responsible,” my mother mused. “About killing the bacteria, I mean.” She leaned over and spoke to one of the women, who was, at that moment, cutting the bones out of a tuna. “How do you know you’ve gotten them all?”

  “Excuse?” said the woman.

  “I’m talking about the bones,” yelled my mother, as if the woman were hard of hearing, not foreign in extraction. “How do you know if you’ve taken them all out?”

  “Ah, bones,” said the woman. “I know because I do for thirty years. When you do for long time, you know how.”

  “I suppose that’s very true,” said my mother, thinking, no doubt, of how she had been nagging me for thirty years and that, therefore, she knew how. She and the fish-bone cutter-outer were kindred spirits, that’s what they were, and who could have predicted it. “But occasionally, you make mistakes, right? Not on purpose, of course, but a bone can slip through, isn’t that so?”

  “Could get hit by bus, too,” said the woman in an utterance of wisdom that provoked a vigorous nod from my mother.

  “After the canned fish is steamed, it’s cooled,” said Corbin, hurrying us along on the tour. “Then the cans are lidded, labeled, and shipped. And that, ladies, is that. End of story.”

  “Very impressive, I must say,” my mother declared. “I don’t know what I expected, but it looks as though Fin’s has its act together.”

  Corbin seemed greatly relieved. Perhaps he’d taken my mother’s Dateline threat seriously.

  “What would completely restore my confidence in Fin’s, however,” she went on, “would be to get a sense of the chief executive here, the man or woman in charge of the company, the person who sets the tone when it comes to quality control. I’d like to meet with him or her while I’m here, Mr. Beasley. Just for a few minutes.”

  “I’m sorry, but he’s with our advertising agency this morning,” he said. “He’s in the same meeting that I should be getting back to. So I’m afraid—”

  “But you were able to take time out from the meeting,” she interrupted. “I’m only asking for a moment or two with the president of Fin’s, to ask him a few questions. My daughter and I did nearly die, Mr. Beasley. And it was your company that would certainly have been liable.”

  God, she was a battle-ax. Why wasn’t I even more screwed up than I was, I wondered, growing up with a mother who demanded audiences with presidents of tuna fish companies?

  Corbin sighed. “Let me see what I can do.” He left us back in the lobby with the receptionist while he went off to either find the president or pretend to. We waited.

  “Why don’t we just go?” I suggested at one point. “They were nice enough to show us around. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Stacey, there’s something you don’t understand, dear.”

  There was a lot I didn’t understand. Like why I was in a tuna cannery in San Pedro instead of on the set of my own TV series in Hollywood.

  “I’m not doing this for myself,” my mother continued. “I’m here to represent all the little people, the people who are too frightened or sick or busy to rise up and complain about their consumer goods. I’m staying for them. I want to make sure that they don’t get bones in their tuna fish. I want them to feel safe when they go to their pantries to make lunch.”

  “A noble, noble cause,” I said, wishing there were a video of this. I could have sent it to one of those funniest bloopers shows and given my mother’s “little people” a very big laugh.

  Just then, Corbin reappeared, breathless with news. “Mr. Terwilliger, the president of Fin’s, will see you, ladies. But his time really is limited today, so I’ll have to insist that your visit be a short one—about five minutes, tops.”

  “Five minutes is all I’ll need with him,” she told Corbin, squaring her shoulders and winking at me. “I’ll state my case and you can all get back to business.”

  “Then follow me,” said Corbin, taking us to his leader.

  nine

  We had expected to be shown into Mr. Terwilliger’s office for our brief meeting, but we were ushered, instead, into the executive conference room.

  “Wait. Isn’t there some big powwow going on in here with your advertising agency?” I asked nervously as Corbin was about to open the heavy paneled door. “My mother only wanted to—”

  “She wanted to speak to Mr. Terwilliger,” he said. “For that to happen, she’s going to have to speak to him in front of the little group we’ve assembled today. He doesn’t have time for a private meeting, as I explained.” We walked into the room, where at least a dozen people were gathered around a long rectangular table. I figured that the man at the head of the table, the one with the gray hair and gray suit and gray complexion, was Terwilliger. He was also the one without a pen and legal pad
in front of him, which tipped me off that he was the boss, the guy who didn’t have to take notes.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Corbin, getting everyone’s attention. “Say hello to Mrs. Helen Reiser and her daughter, uh—”

  “Stacey Reiser,” I volunteered and gave them my best actress-y smile. I wondered if any of them recognized me, either from the commercials or the TV guest spots or even from Pet Peeve. Yup, I decided. That cute guy in the corner knows I’m an actress. I can tell by the way he’s looking at me, trying to figure out what he’s seen me in and which part I played and whether I’ll give him my autograph when the meeting is over. Fame was fun, I had to admit. Even at my level.

  “Mrs. Reiser wrote to Fin’s a few weeks ago with a complaint about our product,” Corbin went on, directing his remarks toward Mr. Terwilliger. “In response, I invited her to tour our cannery and see for herself that we care very much about quality control and that we’d like her to remain a loyal Fin’s customer.” He turned to my mother. “Mrs. Reiser, why don’t you tell Mr. Terwilliger what’s on your mind as succinctly as you can, and then we’ll let you drive back to Los Angeles with your daughter, all right?”

  “All right,” said my mother, who, I suddenly realized, had not the slightest trace of performance anxiety, despite the fact that she was about to speak in front of a roomful of strangers. Actors are trained to deal with such anxiety—I had taken several courses in overcoming stage fright—but she neither shook nor sweated nor blinked an inordinate number of times. She was as self-possessed as if she were about to lecture me on the subject of my messy kitchen. “But before I speak, I’d prefer to know to whom I’m speaking. Would those around the table please state their name and position with the company?”