The clientele at the Sizzling Skillet was comprised mostly of the office workers from the factories on the west side of the city, whose meal times were as predictable as the orders they placed. In the short time Iris had been waiting on tables, she had developed a knack for identifying people by the food they ate, and entertained herself by anticipating their requests: would the man in Prince of Wales polyester order New England or Manhattan clam chowder? Meatloaf or beef stroganoff? Lemon meringue pie or apple à la mode? But Friday dinner rush was no time to play games, not with a pile of dirty dishes precariously perched on her forearm, and a battery of cutlery rattling in the first dish anchored on her open palm by her left thumb. Her pace was hurried but steady, as she pushed toward her goal: the swinging doors at the back of the room. Seconds later, she was there, and a swift kick with the rubber sole of her right shoe landed her on the other side, in waitress hell. The kitchen.
“Hey, watch where you’re goin’!” Raul the bus boy hissed at her, hopping out of her way to avoid a collision. During the last few yards of the dash, Iris’s attention had been focused exclusively on the plates balanced on her arm, willing them to not crash to the floor, rather on than checking for oncoming traffic through the portholes in the doors.
“Sorry!” Iris said, before she could stop herself from apologizing. She would have been quite happy to smash the door into Raul’s ugly nose. Since her first day on the job, the guy had started pestering her, popping up out of nowhere when she was setting up the dining room in the interval between lunch and dinner, while he was supposed to be tending to his own chores in the kitchen. She was immensely irritated by the vulgar remarks he half-whispered as he walked by her, in a voice muffled just enough to make Iris doubt whether she had heard right, and allow her to pretend she had not heard at all. That very afternoon, while she was filling salt shakers at the work station, he had passed behind her, gyrating and singing the words “voulez-vous couchez avec moi,” while his hand happened to brush against her butt. Never one hundred percent sure about what exactly Raul said or did, she hesitated mentioning it to anyone out of fear that verbalizing her impressions would transform them into accusations, and accusations were bound to lead to unpleasant confrontations. One day, when she had gone home particularly tired and upset, she confided in Lily, who suggested that the best strategy was to avoid being alone with Raul, and continue to ignore him, in the hope that he would stop. These situations usually had a way of resolving themselves.
Depositing her tottering load on the stainless steel counter that was the domain of Walt, who as a young man had worked in a fine hotel in the Poconos and had introduced himself to Iris as the plongeur, Iris heaved a sigh of relief, and ran the back of her hand over her damp brow. Resisting the temptation to rub her burning eyes for fear of popping her contact lenses and losing them forever in the grime of the kitchen, she blinked at Walt in the bug-eyed manner typical of contact lens wearers. Walt encircled the dirty dishes with hairy forearms, sliding them toward him as if they were stacks of chips won at a gaming table. “Not bad for a rookie, sweetheart!” he grunted almost cheerfully, squinting through the blue haze formed by the smoke from the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth mingled with the clouds of steam rising from the sink.
“Thanks,” Iris said, smiling weakly. “I’ve had lots of practice.” The sound of running water was torture to Iris’s bursting bladder. She extracted her order pad from her pocket, studied her scribbling in an effort to decipher what she had written with hurried hand mere minutes ago, and hastened over to the cook.
“Two tenderloin specials medium well with baked, please!” she called out to the cook, but her words were diced and sautéed before they could find their way to his ears.
“Speak up, sweetheart!” the cook yelled back over the din of pans banging and pots clattering and meat searing and knives chopping.
Iris cleared her throat. “I said, two tenderloin specials medium well with baked!” she repeated, in the loudest voice she could muster, feeling the heat in her face cranking up a notch. She hated blushing almost as much as she hated shouting.
“That’s more like it! Now move it, sweetheart!” he ordered. “Your fish fries for table ten have been sitting here for over five minutes!”
Iris hopped in place as she reached for the two hot dishes; she was sure to wet her pants any minute. She rushed away, pausing to scoop a serving of coleslaw onto each plate from a metal canister, before heading back out the swinging doors.
“Capotosti!”
She froze in her tracks at the sound of Mr. Henderson’s voice, her rubber soles screeching on the tiles as she pivoted to face the owner of the Sizzling Skillet.
“Yes, Mr. Henderson?” she asked.
“Monkey dish!” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” Iris asked.
“Where’s the monkey dish?”
“Um. I don’t know, Mr. Henderson,” Iris replied, not having the slightest idea of where the monkey dish was, nor what it was, though she was certain that was not the response he wanted to hear. The hot dishes were starting to scald the tender underside of her forearm. She wondered if the customers at table ten would notice if her skin came away from her arm with the plates when she served them.
“Coleslaw is cold and runny,” Mr. Henderson continued as she squirmed, knees pressed tightly together. “Deep-fried haddock and fries are hot and crispy. If these elements collide, as they are bound to do, the way you are serving them, they all get ruined. Ruined!”
“I’m sorry Mr. Henderson,” Iris said.
“We don’t serve sorry here, young lady, we serve quality! Now get a move on while those dinners are still edible! You’ve been lolling around too long. And don’t let me catch you without a monkey dish again!” Mr. Henderson admonished.
“I won’t,” Iris assured him, making a mental note to talk to Gloria, the matronly waitress with varicose veins and dyed red hair who looked like she had stepped out of a TV sitcom. She even called everyone “honey.” Gloria had been working at the Sizzling Skillet since before Iris was born, and was always ready to share her opinions with anyone who asked, especially when it came to gossip about the regulars. Iris was certain she would welcome the opportunity to reveal everything Iris needed to know about the world of monkey dishes, at least enough to help her survive this jungle until it was time for her to go away to college, where hopefully she could aspire to learning experiences of a more stimulating nature.
Iris had bluffed about a few things to land this job, including her age, (she was still shy of eighteen, and serving alcoholic beverages illegally), and her previous work experience, figuring that waiting on tables could not be any harder than serving up meals for a large family or placating the cravings of fast-food junkies. Her rock-solid reference had been Auntie Rosa, who occasionally treated herself to breakfast at the Sizzling Skillet on her way to work, after attending six o’clock Mass. She loved the toasted hard rolls, and the assorted jellies that came in little plastic tubs with a peel-back foil cover, of which she had a stash of “leftovers” crowding the butter compartment of her refrigerator door. Always warm and outgoing, Auntie Rosa made friends easily, and had become well acquainted with Mr. Henderson and his wife, a stately woman with excellent posture who had the habit of fingering her string of matched pearls with her left hand while ringing up bills on the cash register with her right.
Auntie Rosa said the Hendersons were upstanding people, and devout Methodists. It was possible, according to Auntie Rosa, to occasionally come across fine people that were not Catholics, like the surgeon she worked for at the medical center. “He would put any Catholic to shame,” Auntie Rosa could be heard declaring in his defense whenever anyone attempted to criticize Dr. Andrews, her case resting on the fact that he was a good family man, and, like Auntie Rosa, had refused to consign his infirm mother to a “home.” Auntie Rosa prided herself on her sense of duty and self-sacrifice, and any nagging symptoms that might make her feel underpaid or over
worked were alleviated by the expertly dosed compliments administered by the honorable doctor, and soothed by the affectionate hugs of her grateful patients. Auntie Rosa positively beamed when she told the family about the time Dr. Andrews had taken her aside and said, “There’s not a selfish hair on your head!” or the Christmas he had given her a bottle of port wine as her bonus, and told her to “put your feet up and tell everyone to go to hell.” Everyone but him, of course.
Six weeks into her waitressing career, Iris was dead tired. Each morning she performed a number of chores at home before catching the bus that would take her to the Sizzling Skillet, but was sorry to stick Lily with the cooking, for which she knew her sister had neither the passion nor the patience. She missed cooking and the sense of gratification it gave her to provide her family with nourishment and pleasure; it was the only balm she could offer to soothe their scars of abandonment. However, she did not miss the loud conversations or the bickering or the bad table manners. And she did not miss sitting across the table from that unwanted dinner guest: the empty space left by her mother.
When Iris kicked off her sweaty shoes at the end of the day and collapsed on her bed, she imagined what it must feel like to be a soldier behind enemy lines in a foreign country, struggling to survive in a hostile environment. It was not the challenge of the unfamiliar language and customs that wore her down, it was the sense of being so utterly out of her element. Since her first day on the job, she knew that she did not belong there, in the company of unshaven short-order cooks and disillusioned middle-aged waitresses and vulgar busboys and rude customers. Just as she had not belonged in high school, where the work was too simple and the social life too much of a struggle for either to be worthwhile. Just as she had never felt like she belonged in her own home. Oh sure, they noticed when she was not there to fill the house with the comforting smells of food cooking and furniture polish that made it still seem a home. But did they notice anything else about her? She wanted them to need her, but not as a surrogate housewife or mother.Her, the daughter; her, the sister, the eighth of twelve Capotostis, whose name was Iris.
Salvation from the Sizzling Skillet came one day in the form of a phone call from the head office of Kodak: Iris was being offered a temporary job. Nearly every family in Rochester had a member who at one time or another had worked for the company, and that had been her aspiration since the day after graduation, when she had put on her best dress and taken the bus downtown to apply for a position. She had been trudging down State Street in the dirty city snow, imagining herself passing her days in the sinister looking tower of the tall brick building crowned with five red block letters that stood out against the steely winter sky, when a delivery van sped by, spattering her coat with slush. She was still thinking about her rotten luck and Rochester’s crappy climate as she queued up outside the employment office, when the slope-shouldered gentleman handing out application forms leaned close to her and said in her ear, “You’ll get it.”
“Excuse me?” Iris asked.
“The job. You’ll get it. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years now. I can tell. You’re a Kodak girl.” He winked and smiled at her; Iris thanked him, and smiled back, while debating silently over whether his comment should reassure or depress her. Still smiling, the man adjusted his already straight navy blue tie and ran a hand over his impeccably groomed grey hair. Iris could spot patches of a splotched pink scalp peeking through the comb tracks, and wondered what he must have looked like his first day on the job. She imagined the nostrils at the end of his hooked nose, out of which protruded a small army of renegade hairs, sniffing the air of security mixed with the smell of industrial carpeting and half-drunk cups of stale coffee. The complexion of his youthful face, now grey and lined, would have been suffused with sufficient optimism to appear rosy under the greenish hue of the caged neon lights that crawled across the ceiling and over the maze of cubicles as if searching for a way out.
Yet the gentleman seemed satisfied with his career. Thirty years, working in the same office in the same company, in the same city, in the same rotten climate. She wondered what he had dreamed of as a young man; could it have been this? Could reality pose as a dream come true, an understudy filling in for the protagonist who abandoned the scene because no one had set the stage and none of the other players had learned their lines? What good was a dream, anyway, if it could only exist within the confines of fantasy? If by miracle it should come to fruition, it would no longer exist as such. And why was the same word used to describe your highest aspirations, and something that messed with your brain at night as you slept, arbitrarily barraging you with the most pleasant or frightening scenarios, then abandoning you as it stole away in the groggy vagueness of the first waking instant?
“Wow! This place is huge, Iris!” Lily said, making a sweeping motion in the air with her arm. Her long hair fluttered in the breeze as she leaned out the open window of the Chevy station wagon that bounced along lopsidedly on shot springs.
“Let’s see, I think it’s that way,” Iris said, her attention focused on following signs for the Registrar’s Office. The leafy trees that lined the road through the University of Buffalo’s Main Street campus whispered reassurances of more warm days to come, but the scent and the sound of the leaves had changed since Iris’s first tour of the college the previous spring in the company of her mother, who had insisted on offering her guidance when she realized that Iris was already selecting a college. Iris had been disturbed by the flicker of pleasure she felt as she watched a look of surprise, then dismay, disrupt the placid features of her mother’s face, when Iris told her that she had already been accepted at three different universities, without her assistance.
For the most part, the drive to Buffalo and back had been pleasant, if a bit awkward, like on the other rare occasions Iris had found herself alone with her mother. They had briefly discussed possible careers which might suit Iris, who was still undecided about a major, and who spent the remainder of the time trying to feign interest in what her mother was saying about the cases she was researching in her free time to help provide legal assistance to women who had been abandoned by their husbands and left with no funds and less recourse under the archaic, discriminatory laws of the State of New York.
During that first visit, Iris had been filled with a sense of promise by the budding branches waving in the frisky spring winds that jumped the Canadian border to play hopscotch between lakes Erie and Ontario. Now, there was a rustling of parched leaves as they clung to the branches, exhausted by the summer’s heat, but determined to not relinquish their grip until they could salute the student body with a flourish of fall colors. Whenever autumn approached, Iris could hear Grandma Capotosti’s failing voice in the ear of her memory. “Non si muove una foglia che Dio non voglia,” she would say as she gazed out the upstairs window, tossing stale bread to the birds from the chair where she rocked away her life sentence to life. “Not a leaf may move, unless God wills it,” Auntie Rosa had translated for Iris one day, making Iris regret she had asked. The Italian words sounded poetic, but their meaning had made Iris feel sorry for her grandmother, and angry at God for condemning her to that rocking chair.
“Did you hear me, Iris?” Lily asked.
Iris turned to look at her sister. “What?”
“Sometimes when I talk to you, you look like you’re on another continent,” Lily continued. “I said, this is an amazing campus! It’s huge!”
“You’re right,” Iris said, bobbing her head in agreement, as she pulled into a deserted parking lot. Indeed, it was an amazing campus, and indeed, Iris knew she had a tendency toward distraction. One minute, she would be washing the dishes or cooking, and the branches of the Russian olive tree outside the kitchen window would tap on the pane, and she would look out at it, and instantly begin fantasizing about the groves of olive trees that dotted the countryside in Italy or Spain or Greece. She could almost taste the delectable flavors of the Mediterranean foods she had never eaten explo
ding on her tongue, the same way she could perceive the stimulating discussions of the classes for which she had not yet registered enriching her mind.
“Why are you parking here? We must be a mile away!” Lily said.
Iris proceeded to park the car their father kept for the family’s licensed drivers to share, and whose gas gauge somehow always pointed to the desolate area below “E” whenever Iris needed to use it. With a turn of the key, she cut the engine, and closed her eyes briefly, welcoming the silence conceded by the ceasefire from the muffler that had survived another Rochester winter by the rusty skin of its tailpipe. “That’s why,” Iris said. “I don’t want to make my grand entrance with this jalopy.”
“So you mean we have to walk?” Lily asked.
“C’mon, it won’t kill you,” Iris said. She could never figure out why her sister sometimes seemed to have so little energy. Lily’s grey-green eyes shone brighter than all the stars in the universe combined when she sang or talked about James Gentile, but at other times, they had the glassy, distant look of a much older person, hardened by a lifetime of hardship and disappointments.
“I’ll have plenty of walking to do around here,” Iris said, as they slammed their car doors simultaneously. “I’ll be living on the other campus, and taking classes on both. I guess there’s a bus that goes back and forth.” She wondered whether she had made a mistake choosing such a huge, sprawled-out university, after detesting her overpopulated high school. She knew the school enjoyed a good reputation: even her brother John, who knew everything about colleges, having already attended three different ones himself, had said so. And since it was in New York State, she could take advantage of the Regents scholarship she had been awarded to cover part of the tuition costs. But she knew the real justification for her choice lay in the distance, a mere sixty miles, that separated the campus from her family’s home on Chestnut Crest, where she would be leaving Lily to fend for herself and their father and younger brothers. Buffalo was just a short ride on a Greyhound bus from home.
[Iris and Lily 01.0 - 03.0] The Complete Series Page 44
