The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  “We laid out the case for him,” Robespierre said. “It’s pretty simple. We ran some models projecting how much business you account for, combining your customer retention rate and word-of-mouth referrals. It’s an amazing number, more than half their revenue.” She pushed the packet in her lap. “Mom, you own that place.”

  It was a truth she’d always known but had never bothered crunching the numbers on: Slippy’s lifetime of profits had been built on the back of her industry and talent. “Not technically,” she said.

  “You’re the fastest cashier in California, no competition. You don’t make mistakes. You’re actually pretty polite to customers. They respect you. And the relationships you have go back decades. You are their one constant. The car that always starts. A problem they never have to think about. That’s power.”

  Like being a great chef, Esmerelda thought—Bruce Zoogman’s bankable premium experience. “What’d you ask for?” she wondered.

  “Triple your salary and promotion to managing director. A significant equity stake. Rights to own and operate additional branches with the franchise fee waived. Basically, a cut of everything you do best.”

  “Enough cash to leave this shithole forever,” Marat said, his breath fragrant with Mendocino kine bud.

  “I used to be on top of the world, you know,” she said. “You’ve seen the magazine covers. I could bake my way out of a war zone.”

  “Well right now you’re a washed-up nobody with twenty years’ experience in paper products,” Marat responded. “I’ve never seen you so much as reheat a slice of pizza. Seriously, when’s the last time you cooked anything?”

  She thought on it hard, no specifics coming to mind. “I think I made some toast back in ’98,” she lied.

  “We have to play to your market strengths, Ma,” Robespierre interjected. “You can make a lot of money in copy shop management.”

  Esmerelda saw the road and where it went, formal clothes and uncomfortable shoes, long days at a boring manager job, permanent salad crankiness, bodily pains from building up her muscles again, finishing at the gates of a midlevel career she’d never wanted for a second.

  Far and away the best option she’d had in her children’s lifetime.

  By Friday she’d only cheated on her diet four times—a pizza smuggled into work with a paper delivery, sushi dropped off via the special services van, miniature Butterfingers slipped over as a tip, mail-ordered smoked salmon. Even with those daily dalliances her caloric intake was chopped by 80 percent, translating into an unencumbered aura that sharpened her mind and boosted her spirits and accelerated her foot speed such that she had a statistically significant chance of actually winning a race with any hunchback over eighty. Over the weekend she went shopping with Robespierre, cleaning out all the designer clothes in plus-size clearance bins and picking up several sets of custom-made quintuple-wide heels. Monday she showed up for work styled out like a CEO, slate suit paired with a full-on round of makeup that made her face look serious and organized, even hinting at the remote possibility of sex. “Goddamn, my feet kill,” she muttered, descending into the Gargantuan extra slowly so she wouldn’t snag her new duds on any corners or hooks.

  “Talk about extreme makeover,” Lakshmi said, her face falling into surprised mousey piles. “Did you get promoted?”

  “Soon,” Esmerelda retorted. “Better keep the fastball on ice.”

  All of the early-morning customers noticed Esmerelda’s new uniform, with the professors spouting compliments and the students whistling fatuous catcalls and the executives doling out a professional, curt nod of the head, with the cumulative effect of everyone unconsciously increasing their tips 300 percent. At nine the secretaries reacted with shouts and screams, many clambering around back to hug her and check out her labels, then settling in to discuss how much she’d paid, where she’d shopped, how nicely the colors accented her features and made her seem authoritative and sophisticated. Slippy Sanders nearly dropped his briefcase when he caught a glimpse of her boardroom regalia, and hustled straight to his office without so much as a wave.

  He was fiddling with a calculator when Esmerelda barged in a minute later. “Too busy to say hi?” she said. “Well maybe this’ll get your attention—I quit.” Sunshine filled her head, grassy fields and cheesy pop tunes and the childhood she could barely remember.

  “No,” he said, serious as she’d ever seen him. “You can’t.”

  “Sure I can. Bye.” It was that easy.

  She left, wading through the store and shaking hands with customers, many of whom had overheard her and were cheering—cheering? —and walking along with her, patting her on the back and saying it was about time, she was the heart and soul of this place, the best copy shop person they’d ever seen, they’d follow her anywhere. “Esmerelda!” called Slippy, hopping across the room. “Wait!”

  “Yeah?” she said, watching him run after her as if in a dream, a craven web of fear stitched across his face.

  “I’ll sign,” he sputtered. “I need you. Please stay.”

  “No,” she said, delirious with renewed stardom, right here in front of her the whole time.

  “Think about it,” he warned. “Do you really want to set out on your own? All the start-up costs? Buying equipment? Hiring people? Lawsuits? Making sure the toner comes on time and that people show up for work and that the health benefits check doesn’t bounce? Being friendly to every two-bit idiot you meet? Dealing with landlords and fixing problems and being on call every hour for the rest of your life?”

  She saw it clearly enough, the piles of mail and forms, constant appointments and negotiations, phones ringing through the night. Her body twitching in physical repulsion, sweat flowing from all orifices.

  “OK,” she bobbed her head. “OK.”

  The escalators at Van Ness station deposited Robespierre in a bank of fog, desolate gray streets infested with chilly cobwebs. She had matured into a sensationally average-looking young woman, bean-shaped brown eyes spaced far apart, skin the color of cheap chocolate milk, small breasts, frizzy hair, and a face that wasn’t quite pretty and wasn’t quite homely and was just kind of there. Over the course of her seventeen years she had identified a tendency to collect extra pounds in her rear and thus shared her mother’s perpetual diet, further buttressed by long jogs along the beach and daily sets of crunches and biweekly workouts to a hippie-ish yoga DVD she’d picked up at a yard sale. She looked bland up close, but through a distinctive if conservative taste in clothes, a never-say-die stylist, and an industrial hairbrush pilfered from her mother’s wool bag, she crafted a seductive, imperfect, can-do allure, a look that said she could leap over buildings—almost a star.

  A three-minute charge through the meteorological smoke-screen on Market Street and she was seated inside the CopySmart flagship store manager’s office watching her mom work the phone.

  “ . . . not stupid. At that volume, we need a major discount, bucko. And we haven’t been doing business long enough for me to give a goat’s ass about your costs. Call back with a lower number or don’t bother.”

  Her mother’s new height continued to astonish her. Esmerelda had become an extremely vertical woman, five foot ten when totally unwound, with wall-straight posture imposed on her spine by the now-defunct Gargantuan. Watching her move around the room with the phone pinned to her shoulder, still thick and double-chinned but oddly mobile, Robespierre experienced a sense of out-of-place impropriety, as if intruding on an office blow job.

  “Talk it over, be my guest. My kid’s here. Gotta run.” Esmerelda hung up the phone and booted a trash can across the room. “There was a time,” she grunted, “when I could get rid of assholes like that with just a look.” Through the corners of her rolling eyes she noticed Robespierre’s tired face and uncharacteristically tight lips. “What’s the scoop, sheriff?”

  Robespierre repeated the speech she’d given that morning over breakfast, a brusque version of the gentle pleading she’d delivered twice the da
y before: “We got a notice about taxes that you’d better do something about. Also I need you to pay me back for the grocery shopping. And Marat and I need new clothes for school.”

  “Hello, nice to see you too! My day was fine, thanks. A shitty sales guy just now, but I’ll manage.” She chuckled and pulled Robespierre against her side, jamming her up against the skeins of skin beneath her blouse, cascading from throat to thighs like rubber waterfalls. “Will you take a personal check?”

  “Cash.”

  Esmerelda bent open a paperclip. “Can it wait until payday?”

  “Do I have a choice?” A line delivered so benignly it sneaked inside Esmerelda before exploding.

  “Tell you what. I’ll buy you dinner for free, call it interest.”

  “Not hungry.” Also impatient, sick of the dumb dopey dance. Playing accountant, little miss do-it-all, and whip-cracking bitch had certain advantages—she who controls the pocketbook controls the city—but Robespierre’s credit card was maxed out and her mother’s excuses weren’t remotely plausible, or even entertaining.

  “Then squirrel it away in your cheeks! Haven’t I taught you not to turn down a free meal?”

  “But then I’d owe you something.”

  Esmerelda slobbed her with a gooey smooch. “And what’s wrong with that?”

  They decamped for the Tip Top Diner across the street, a throwback joint with vinyl booths and personal jukeboxes and a cook who sang old soul hits while he grilled. Esmerelda ordered salads for both of them, with a round of glass-bottle Diet Cokes to patch things up, then sat back and took it as Robespierre outlined their perilous financial situation, transferred balances and deferred payments, the series of false addresses she’d set up to waylay the collections agencies, Esmerelda’s huge salary going entirely into debt servicing and late fees. Their portfolio had gone sour, their investment in quick-grow Central Valley real estate was tanking, Marat’s collection of rare first-press reggae LPs had devalued to squat no thanks to rampant overplaying. She pulled out a notebook and drew a chart like a dive flag, along with percentage symbols and decimal points leading to huge negative grand totals. Esmerelda slurped on her beverage and absorbed the colossal failure—all the hot stock tips purchased from online gurus fizzling up, the elaborately leveraged mobile home-community management deals now worth pennies on the dollar, the investment in a start-up karaoke bar chain deep underwater. Everything so bad it ran right around to silly, and Esmerelda maintained a go-lucky nutball grin accordingly.

  A shriveled black woman appeared alongside their booth. “Esmerelda? That you?”

  Esmerelda set down her soda. She blinked; her chin jiggled; her fingers straightened like a pack of pencils. It was the closest thing to fear Robespierre had ever seen her mother display.

  She nodded slowly.

  The woman smiled. She was gnomish in appearance, well under five feet tall, with child-sized fingers and a tiny bird head, her hair clipped back with plastic blue barrettes. She wore a pink dress and purple pumps and a huge gold crucifix chained around her neck. “You look great, girl. Just great,” she said. She examined Robespierre through grapeseed eyes. “You must be Robespierre. I haven’t seen you in a long, long time.”

  Robespierre stood up and held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you. You must be a friend of my mother’s.”

  “You could say that,” the woman said. “I’m your grandmother. In fact, I gave you your name.”

  Robespierre sat down, still smiling. “You must be confused,” she laughed. “My grandmother’s dead!” She paused for her mother to launch a cavalcade of insults at this strange shrunken woman who’d just lied her ass off, but Esmerelda sat perfectly still and breathed hyperactively through her mouth. “Mom?” Robespierre reached for her mother’s wrist. “Are you OK?”

  The elderly woman smiled. There was something refreshingly gentle about her and her pink dress, something toylike and joyful and recognizable in her eyes, which were spaced a little too far apart and colored a turbid shade of brown Robespierre knew well from the mirror, balanced nicely by the freakishly familiar spherical rump plumping up the woman’s dress like a spare tire.

  “It’s true, dear,” said Karen Winslow. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Yes!” Heat broiled Robespierre’s head. “How can you expect to walk in off the street and make some ridiculous claim that you’re my grandmother and then eat dinner with us? What kind of idiots do you take us for? If you want money, show some guts and ask for it.” Robespierre had been itching to tell somebody off for years—every day kids at school directed nonsensical accusations at teachers and each other, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, hurt feelings and perennial standing as class president to consider—and she was starting to get the hang of it when she felt her mother’s hand on her forearm and understood that everything the woman said was true.

  “Please,” Esmerelda said, sliding toward the wall. “Sit.”

  “Thank you, Esmerelda. I can’t get over how good you look. Spectacular. If Jasper were here to see you now.”

  Robespierre listened intently, as Jasper was a name she’d heard around the house years ago, a cornerstone of Fanny’s after-dinner harangue. “Jasper,” Esmerelda hiccupped.

  “Do you remember the rides your father used to give you?” Karen Winslow asked Robespierre, her smoky eyes glowing. “He’d strap you in his wheelbarrow and run up and down Market Street, leaning left and right and backwards and Lord knows what. It was silly and dangerous, but you kids loved it. First thing in the morning, before you went in with your mother at the copy shop.”

  Robespierre remembered those mornings in blazing detail, the whirl of color and oncoming traffic and cold ocean wind key elements in a recurring dream that had penetrated her sleep every month of her life. She felt her chest prick and recalled an inane pride at being able to say the word wheelbarrow clearly, far better than her brother. “I thought that was the babysitter,” Robespierre said.

  “Never could afford one, I’m afraid. Though I pitched in when I could. We all did.”

  “So you’re my grandmother? My father’s mother?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then where is he now? Can I meet him?” She looked over at her mother and found a strange woman crammed into the corner, stone-faced and silent, her skin turning blue.

  “Jasper disappeared a long time ago, dear. I haven’t seen him myself in thirteen years. I haven’t seen you in about twelve years, Esmerelda, since they closed the investigation.”

  Esmerelda lifted her chin a micrometer.

  “Did you know that you also have an aunt, Miss Robespierre? My daughter, Tina, lives with me. She’s handicapped, but a lovely woman. Just adores watching quiz shows. You should come over for Jeopardy! sometime.”

  “But what about my father? What do you mean by disappeared?” Robespierre stared at her mother’s barren face.

  “We don’t know, dear. He just went missing.”

  “Is he dead?” Robespierre reached across the table and clamped Karen Winslow’s thin shoulders. “Grandma?”

  Karen Winslow sighed and shook her head, then slid off the booth to the floor. “I should go,” she said. “You two need to talk.”

  “Grandma?” Karen bent her head back toward the booth. “It was nice to meet you,” Robespierre said. “I’ll tell my brother all about you.”

  “Marat,” Karen said, “send him my love.” And then she was gone, her pink dress flapping through the diner’s hot cheese smell like a slow ship’s sail, their table upended in her wake. Robespierre watched her leave, then turned her sights on her mother and fired at will:

  Why did you tell us you were artificially inseminated?

  Why did you say the man in our memories was the worst babysitter in world history?

  Why didn’t you introduce me to my grandmother before?

  Are you ashamed of us or something?

  Don’t you think that’s wrong?

  Where is my dad?

  W
hat did he do?

  What did he look like?

  What did he like to talk about?

  Why did he go away?

  Do you love him?

  Do you love me and Marat?

  Do you love anything?

  Esmerelda did not speak for the duration of their meal, the train ride home, her evening slate of television, preparations for bed. Robespierre followed her to her bedroom, her questions landing hot as napalm while Esmerelda crawled into her recently downsized single-king bed and read her nightly gossip magazine, extinguished the light, fell asleep immediately, and rolled through a couple of sleep cycles, until the weight of the day wore Robespierre into submission and she passed out in a ball on the carpet.

  At four in the morning, Esmerelda got up and walked across the bedroom to where Robespierre slept bunched up along the wall. Esmerelda nudged her with her foot, attempting a toe tickle.

  “Hey, kiddo, time to head to bed, you know? School tomorrow, don’t forget. Giddyup now, up and at ’em. I haven’t been able to carry you in years.”

  Robespierre rolled onto her side. “What did you do to him, Mom?” she whispered.

  “I’ll explain everything after school,” Esmerelda said. “Get some sleep, OK?”

  Esmerelda spent the day creating flow charts and probability diagrams on the CopySmart computers, detailing Jasper’s general idiocy, her exploitable position as a washed-up chef, her limited employment options. Testimonials from Slippy Sanders and a couple of her long-term secretary clients established that she’d needed help and Jasper had been there, promising stability and affection and sizable dining savings, even dug up a ring, but he’d run out on their wedding night and hadn’t been back since. Color-coded lists illustrated how she’d pondered for years her decision to move back in with Grandma Fanny, how once all the variables were weighed it had been best for the children and their mother; the long-term drawbacks of Fanny’s one-sided contract were still a statistical improvement over living in a Swedish orgy camp connected to a perilous flight of stairs, and it wasn’t like she’d been able to cover the rent anyway—they’d been evicted for Chrissakes. As for writing Jasper out of the script, let’s face it, he’d abandoned them; he hadn’t truly loved them or he would have stayed, visited, written letters, hired a skywriter, dropped a fucking dime. Instead he’d flipped out over a garden-variety wedding-night crack and vanished, a chicken coward pansy child-support-avoiding wimp. Not worthy of mention. Period.