by C. L. Donley
“Just do yourself a favor and stay in the kitchen, near the kitchen as much as you can. Even if they flirt with you and talk to you, be nice, but don’t encourage them. I’m saying this for you, not for them. Because it’s not gonna end bad for them, it’ll only be bad for you. One of them is the son of the owner of this place. Benjamin Dvorak. He’s very nice, very down to Earth, but don’t be fooled. You do not want to get caught up with any of these people.”
The advice struck everyone as a bit old-fashioned, but it was coming from an elderly woman named Virginia, so they understood. Besides, she seemed to be speaking from experience. A few of the guys seemed to scoff at it, and Cynthia couldn’t tell if that meant that they thought the girls they worked with weren’t all that, or that stockbrokers weren’t. Jorge seemed to appreciate her making a speech that he would not, at this point, be comfortable making.
Cynthia stayed in the back for her first day, doing lunch service and prepping for tomorrow.
“You work so fast, Cynthia,” Jorge marveled. “Having you here is going to save my ass.”
“You don’t need me, you’re doing a great job.”
“I don’t think I earned very much respect this morning.”
“Are you kidding? Anyone that didn’t appreciate you giving Virginia props today, can get fired.”
“She turned out to be… very opinionated.”
“Not so shy when it came to the sex talk.”
“I can only imagine what she’s already seen working here.”
“The sheer tomfoolery. You know she looked straight at me when she started talking.”
Jorge laughed. “So, I’m thinking about incorporating some of the food we did at the steakhouse. You still remember the chicken fried steak?”
“I remember that it killed me to put all that bouillon in the gravy every day.”
“Yeah, about that. I was thinking we’re free to make tweaks however we want.”
“Now you’re speaking my language.”
“Got any other recipes that are easy for feeding armies and that anyone can replicate?”
Cynthia’s gray-blue eyes sparkled. “I can think of a few.”
“Oh and by the way… speaking of Virginia’s impassioned warning earlier…”
“Yeah?” Cynthia smirked.
“Just remember that whatever you do reflects on me.”
Cynthia furrowed her brow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just saying, Cynthia. You’re young. Beautiful.”
“Also, black and poor.”
“And I think Virginia was probably downplaying it. These rich boy types… people like us, we’re disposable to them.”
“You must really think I’m some kind of sucker.”
“I’m just being protective. I know I’m firmly in the friend zone—”
“Jorge…”
He gave her a look that stopped her from going further.
“As I was saying, I’m in the friend zone, and that’s fine because we work together. Believe it or not, I’d much rather have you on my team. You’re young and too pretty to be working in a kitchen. You might as well hear it now because you’re about to hear it a hundred more times.”
“We weren’t even allowed to take outside tips from customers at the steakhouse. You think I don’t know what it means to stay out of trouble?”
“It’s not as easy as all that. I’m just saying. If, for whatever reason, it can’t be avoided… just be careful.”
“You have my word, Jorge, that I will clock in every day, do my job, and then kindly leave.”
Not an hour later, Cynthia was eating her words. Because the moment she noticed Ben smoking a cigarette near the service entrance, she nearly lost her breath.
He looked to be a little older, the senior to her freshman. Yet something about him seemed even beyond those years. He was on crutches, those state of the art ones that cuff around your arm and have handles halfway down. He’d shed them and stacked them up against the concrete building, as though he didn’t really need them.
He wore the same uniform as the other young men at work: a crisp, white dress shirt and slacks. But he didn’t look like the others, who were all auditioning to be the lead in American Psycho. The clothes weren’t wearing him. He was that kind of fine that looked like it was from a bygone era, but would never not be sexy. Like some handsome ghost, some strange hormonal manifestation from the distant past come to test her resolve to not lose focus.
He returned himself to the crutches and it was the first time she saw his exaggerated gait, his calf and thigh muscles turned inward, the soles of his shoes lifted off the ground. He was tall, despite his bowed appearance. There was nothing diminutive or apologetic in his walk, as if daring you to perceive it as anything but normal.
Her inner voice gasped. She was instantly tamping down her imagination and curiosity. What does a disabled guy do to make himself that sexy? Maybe there’s a chance that every other woman in the world is too shallow to share her opinion, and she could have him with virtually no competition. Ever. He had to be loaded to be working at a place like this. If not now, then he will be.
She wasn’t imagining things, this guy was not like the others. In fact, it was impossible. Even if it turned out he was somehow a full-on jerk, she could probably still be in love with him. She slightly preferred it. That way, if he suddenly died, as her father did, maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much.
Her proposed life trajectory with this guy took all of about 2.5 seconds. If she hadn’t ducked behind a wall before she could get a good look at his deep-set brown eyes, the same color as his dark hair, she may have never looked away. His shirt sleeves were unbuttoned and rolled up, as though in the midst of a long workday that showed no signs of being over. She was just able to drink in the sight of him taking the last drag of his cigarette before he retreated back inside. She took a deep breath and shook her head when the coast was clear.
“Shit,” she exclaimed as if remembering something foreboding. She could only hope and pray that she wasn’t his type. But if Virginia’s impassioned speech was any indication, she didn’t stand a chance.
* * *
“So, I know you were wondering, I aced my interview today,” Melanie began.
“That’s great, honey,” Ben said absentmindedly over the phone, using his break time to return his fiancee’s call.
Melanie and Ben had been dating since junior year. Melanie was in law school, about to become a paralegal at a prestigious firm not far from the Dvorak building. Her father was an investor friend of the family who had a fortune in natural resources.
“I won’t go into it now, I know you’re busy. I’ll regale the tale at dinner so everyone can hear it all at once.”
“…Oh shit, was that tonight?”
“Tomorrow,” Melanie gave a disappointed sigh. “Don’t tell me you have to work.”
“Probably. The guys haven’t even started on this pitch book, I doubt it’ll be done by tomorrow.”
“Ben, you’re still pulling all-nighters, working 100 hours a week? Surely, you can get out of it.”
“Well… I’m sure I could, but the guys need me. Their dad isn’t the owner.”
“Ben, anyone who’s still bringing up who you are and who you’re related to, after three years, can go fuck themselves. You’re playing by the rules, even for a Princeton graduate. And as much as I admire you for it, we’ve been planning this for weeks. I worked around your little job stipulations and scheduled it in advance. Your own father is going to be at this dinner, Benjamin.”
“My father isn’t a 2nd tier analyst. But you know what my schedule’s like. I told you that plans like that are tentative, Mel.”
“You’re gonna be these guys’ bosses eventually, whether you cut out for Sunday dinner or not.”
“All the more reason to prove myself. If not to them, to me.”
Melanie rubbed her forehead wordlessly, reminding herself that she only had to deal with this strange
pseudo-ambition of his for a few years. And after that, it would all be dinner parties and rubbing shoulders and using Dvorak connections to get things done. She liked that he still wanted to be a boy scout at this age, probably a moral side effect of being born a cripple. Slows down the inevitable progression into permanent asshole status, like their fathers. She might even be able to love their children.
Still. Eventually, he would need to become that asshole. The fact that he couldn’t just take the advantageous hand that was dealt him and be happy with it was pretty annoying. If he was trying to be like a poor person, he was insulting them with his insistence on always having a choice.
“If you didn’t always inisist on trying to subsist on that paltry salary, you could be closer to the me on the upper east side.”
“$140K is not paltry to most people, Mel.”
“It is to New Yorkers, and you know it. Especially if they work as much as you. You’re basically making as much as a butcher.”
“Are we honestly going to have this conversation every time we talk?”
“No. Just when you cancel on me. We’ve already postponed this dinner twice. I can’t cancel again, Benjamin,” Melanie warned.
He was pretty sure if he came waltzing into dinner drunk off his ass, pissed inside of whatever protein they were having, announced that the marriage was off and that he was quitting, Melanie would just laugh nervously, her parents a little less so, and his father would forcefully tell him to sit down with only a look.
“Don’t cancel. I’ll do my best, but like I said I can’t give you a definite either way.”
“You know, two people in a committed relationship need to spend at least 2.3 hours together daily to realistically beat the statistics of divorce.”
“Well, we’re not married yet. Once I get the MBA things will be different, I promise. With all due respect, Melanie, you knew what the job was.”
“I did,” was Melanie’s level headed response. “But we also agreed not to let work encroach on the relationship. We need to start making time for each other.”
A distant part of him was always screaming Get out. Now. He didn’t know whether to trust this voice, but every time Melanie used the term “relationship” and “we agreed” that voice got a little louder.
But he was too far in with Melanie. She knew and accepted everything about him, understood the bizarre confinement of prominent families. The sex was wild. He was glad of that. As a young man, he was certain that was all he would ever need if he had to marry Melanie to appease his father.
He tried to remember why, if they had all the privileges that everyone else dreamed about having, the two of them were letting adulting crush them into a fine powder before they were 30. The two were practically competing against each other for who had the most to prove.
After hanging up with Melanie he spent the night on the couch of his office. Ben woke up stiff at the sound of his phone’s alarm. He’d only had about four hours of sleep, so technically it only counted as a super long nap. He changed into a clean shirt he kept overnight and went back to the floor, ready to start the next day’s shift.
Perhaps it was because he had no other aspirations, perhaps it was because his trajectory was plainly laid out, but he didn’t find the schedule all that grueling. It was 12 hours a day every day, essentially. Sometimes more, sometimes not. Aside from a few sleep-deprived nights, the schedule kept him focused, usefully occupied and under the watchful eye of his father and those that worked for him. He certainly had no time to spend the money he was earning independently for the first time in his life. He was starting to invest it a little, now that he’d fully gotten over the learning curve.
He did have a little source of color in his life— no pun intended— and that was one of the young women who’d started work in the cafeteria two months ago. He knew it was two months ago, because the kitchen started serving this brown butter chicken that nearly made him weep, and chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes, of all things. The associates fought sleep the entire day the first time it was served. The next time, two of them up and quit, one of them tearfully. The chicken fried steak was not served again.
A few weeks later she was out front on the line, serving. Ben couldn’t stop staring at her. He was trying to figure out if she was indeed as beautiful as he thought she was. The sterile white cafeteria uniform and gratuitous chef’s hats they all wore had a way of catfishing everyone.
It took him another week to speak to her.
Cynthia. Her name tag boasted her name. She was tall and caramel-skinned with cool, translucent eyes. She didn’t talk much, but of what she did say he’d detected an accent that he couldn’t quite place.
“Are you the one responsible for the butter chicken?” he’d begun clumsily.
“Guilty,” she’d replied, her tone cordial as she lazily blinked her gorgeous eyes and his heart nearly stopped. She gave him no smile.
He was bothering her.
It was an entirely foreign feeling. From women, at least. Ben had been overcompensating since he was a kid and entertaining unsuspecting nurses since he was a toddler. Besides, Ben had always been a good looking guy, always well-dressed, poised, always a Dvorak. But here, he blended into a corporate, neo-con herd. He’d done so on purpose. And he was holding up the line.
He told her he wanted prime rib and she hastily picked up the big knife and serving fork.
“The chicken fried steak, too, I presume?”
She grinned as though flattered.
“My mother’s recipe.”
“We were all nodding off in front of our computer screens. Even Evan and he uses a stand-up desk,” Ben nodded towards his colleague in line behind him.
She shook her head, smirking. She kept her composure long enough to lay his meat onto a steaming hot plate before she had to crack, thinking of some random associate falling asleep standing up like a horse.
“I was told it did not go over well,” she said as she handed him back the plate heavy with prime rib.
“If it was your mother’s recipe, I’m sure you know that’s probably impossible.”
She shrugged, carving roast chicken for Evan. “Not everyone likes perfection, I get it,” she joked with a grin.
“Two of us quit the last time you served it,” Ben said. She shook her head and rolled her eyes smiling as if refusing to be blamed for that.
“It’s true, it literally made them re-evaluate their entire lives,” Evan filled in. She gave Evan a laugh and Ben was instantly flooded with jealousy. He could feel Evan consequently growing in confidence, over a jar that Ben had loosened. Ben fought an eye-roll of his own.
He tried getting a little more small talk out of her every day, but unfortunately for him, she was a consummate professional. After two months, however, they’d managed a rapport of sorts. And she was used to seeing him as one of her first customers early in the morning.
This morning, Ben approached the company chow line with the usual spring in his step.
“Whatever’s in that coffee pot, Cynthia, I need you to add rocket fuel to it.”
“Another all-nighter?”
“I’m in the same pants I was in yesterday, Cynthia.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she managed a smile as she poured. “Anything else?”
“Nope. Gonna use caffeine and hunger to keep myself awake today.”
“You’re gonna keel over one day. ‘Least if you were a doctor you could be saving lives,” she shook her head.
“That may be the first time I’ve ever heard an opinion of yours.”
“Oh yeah? How’d you like it?” she grins.
“…It’s… not surprising.”
“As in, stupid.”
“Not in the least. At least it isn’t anti-capitalist.”
“Probably wouldn’t go over well in a place like this, huh?”
“Not to mention completely contradict what you’re doing right now, which is working for money.”
“So it is a dum
b one,” she smiles.
“No.”
“Liar.”
“You’re saying my time is better spent on a more tangible result, if I’m going to spend it to death.”
Cynthia, nods her head this way and that, apparently convince that he wasn’t just humoring her.
“Okay.”
“It’s not a stupid opinion. And not one I hear very often. Not to my face, at least.”
“Can I ask you a question?” she suddenly said.
His body warmed, his insides flooded with excitement. Cynthia wanted to know something about him.
“Shoot,” he answered.
“Sometimes I see you walking around on crutches…”
Oh. That.
It’s silly that he almost forgets. Sillier that he expects everyone else to.
“Oh. Well, I was born with cerebral palsy. Six surgeries, physical therapy every day for twelve years, speech therapy, best specialists around the world, yadda yadda. I get around pretty good. Sometimes I have flare-ups.”
“I’d say you do. You’re a lucky guy.”
“Not lucky, just rich.”
She had no idea who he was and who he was related to. How could she? She was basically the lunch lady. More beautiful than any lunch lady he’d ever seen, but still.
Cynthia shrugged, “A lucky sperm then,” she unexpectedly replied.
“Fair enough,” he chuckled.
He paid her for the coffee, about to offer a cordial comeback, but after her comment, he couldn’t help himself.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You could be out in the world, saving lives with that beautiful face of yours, but instead you’re here feeding rich white undergrads.”
She laughed as she put his money in the till.
“Everyone’s gotta eat.”
“Not us,” he scoffed.
“Even you,” she insisted, her eyes a bit of a different color today, like a calico cat.
“That uniform is a crime against humanity, you know that?” he said, sounding offended.
