Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  She dreamed about it: Chef slamming the bell, Pivot calling out orders, everyone running about. Once she woke up in the middle of the night and found herself standing beside the kitchen table in her apartment holding a pitcher of water.

  And now it was her last day.

  Breakfast was slow, but lunch was frantic.

  She got a family with four small children. She was headed for the kitchen as the children and their parents plumped through the front door. By the time she got to their table, two of the children were already tearing apart sugar packets, and the baby in the high chair had launched her sippy cup across the room.

  The baby’s name was Harmony, and she was two years old. The great pleasure in Harmony’s life seemed to be dropping things from the high chair to the floor: cutlery, her napkin, the salt shaker. She had plenty of things to drop. Her mother kept handing them to her.

  When Harmony got her meal, spaghetti and meat sauce, she started flinging handfuls of spaghetti.

  Meanwhile there was the woman at table twenty-eight. The woman at twenty-eight was snapping her fingers.

  When Stephanie got to her, the woman didn’t say a word. She just sat there and stared at her plate. Stephanie stared too—without saying a word. It was passive-aggressive, but the woman had snapped her fingers. Stephanie was going to make her talk first. She would have waited her out if it had been quieter, but over at twenty-six one of the boys had crawled under the high chair, and Stephanie could see him unscrewing the lid from the ketchup bottle.

  “Yes?” said Stephanie.

  “This,” said the lady, “isn’t a chicken breast.”

  Stephanie blinked at the chicken breast. She didn’t have a clue what to say.

  “Chicken breasts,” said the woman, “have bones. There are no bones.”

  “It’s boneless,” said Stephanie.

  The woman looked up at her and nodded.

  “Exactly,” said the woman.

  They stared at each other.

  Stephanie cleared her throat.

  She said, “It’s supposed to be boneless.”

  She threw in a Sullivan Nod for good measure. The woman’s lip curled. The woman started to raise her voice. “What do you take me for? Do you take me for an idiot? There’s no such thing as a boneless chicken.”

  Stephanie picked up the plate and said, “I’ll tell Chef.”

  Andy was the pivot that Saturday afternoon. He was standing in front of the line opposite the fry man and the grill man. Andy said, “Up on fourteen. Up on twelve,” and then he looked at Stephanie and said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  Stephanie shook her head.

  Andy said “I need two fries” to the fry man, and then he turned back to Stephanie. “She wants bones?”

  Stephanie nodded.

  Chef walked over and said, “What’s the matter?”

  Andy held the plate out and said, “She wants bones.”

  Chef glared at Stephanie.

  Stephanie said, “Not me. The woman at twenty-eight.”

  Chef had spent an hour deboning and butterflying all the chicken. He didn’t say a word. But his face began to change colour. First to pink, and then to red and then to a deeper red.

  “She wants bones?” he whispered. Stephanie wished he would just yell. Instead he grabbed his hair and began to hop around in a circle, pulling at his hair and moaning.

  Now everyone was staring at Stephanie as if she’d done something wrong. She was about to explain but remembered the family at twenty-six and bolted.

  The father was waving the bill impatiently as she came through the kitchen door.

  As for Harmony, Harmony was holding her spaghetti-smeared doll over the edge of her chair and grinning. As soon as she saw Stephanie she let the doll go and started to cry. Something inside Stephanie snapped. She walked toward the table pretending she hadn’t seen anything, and she ground her foot into the doll’s face.

  Harmony gasped.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Stephanie, lifting her foot, “I am so sorry.”

  Ten minutes later, as Harmony was being carried out, Stephanie and the little girl locked eyes over her father’s shoulder. Harmony glared at her. Stephanie stuck out her tongue.

  That was lunch. At dinner the touchpad on the screen in Peter’s station misaligned. Mysteriously, the touch function shifted one item to the left, which meant that when Peter touched “hamburger” on his display it came out as “salmon steak” on the pivot’s printer. Of course, no one realized this right away. It took about an hour to figure it out, and by then Chef was moving from his chopping block to the stove, weeping noisily. Pamu the dishwasher was sitting glumly on the edge of the sink, eating fries.

  Even Andy the pivot, unflappable Andy, was leaning against the heat lamps, head buried in his hands, refusing to talk.

  The kitchen had ground to a halt.

  Peter was beside himself. The people in Peter’s section were beside themselves.

  “We’re in the weeds now,” said Robin as she and Stephanie waited in front of the line.

  It was Andy who pulled it together. Andy began to yank order slips from the cooking station. He put everyone’s orders on hold as the cooks scrambled to catch up in Peter’s section. It was a logical move, but it meant that pretty soon all the other servers were on edge too.

  Of course it was one of the busiest Saturday nights in weeks. Before long everyone was shouting. Servers screaming at Andy, Andy screaming at Chef, Chef screaming at everyone. Orders appearing so fast there was no room for them under the heat lamps. Andy yelling “Pick up thirteen, pick up twelve, pick up twenty-one! Come on: pick up, pick up, pick up!”

  There was smoke from the grill hovering in the air, blended with tempers, sweat, grease, the smell of fear and all of it, everything, seasoned by the fine spray coming out of Pamu’s dish pit.

  The servers walked into the screaming and started screaming themselves. Then they walked out carrying an order as if everything back there was calm and perfect.

  Stephanie didn’t scream. Instead she flew wordlessly from table to table, from bar to kitchen, as if she were some kind of manic wind-up doll. She picked up orders and set down drinks in a blur. She scraped spaghetti out of high chairs, plucked soggy napkins off the floor, wiped melted ice cream off the tables. She smiled when she didn’t feel like smiling, and said “Enjoy your meal” when she really meant “Why can’t you people eat at home?”

  On the way past the bar, she scooped up ice cubes and dropped them down the back of her blouse to stay cool, just as Robin had shown her.

  “I hate fresh ground pepper,” said Robin as she pounded past Stephanie. She was juggling three enormous plates and a pepper grinder the size of a baseball bat.

  At midnight, Stephanie was sitting at the staff table in the kitchen, her eyes glazed and her jaw slack, exhausted but unable to stop moving. Her section had emptied first. She was folding napkins, doing roll ups.

  Her feet were aching. But she didn’t dare take her shoes off. She knew that if she did she wouldn’t be able to get them back on. Her calves hurt and her knees hurt.

  She looked up.

  Robin was standing there. Stephanie realized that she’d stopped folding. She hadn’t folded anything for a good five minutes. She had been sitting there staring at—who knows, at nothing.

  Robin sat down. “Your last night,” she said. “How does it feel?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stephanie. It was the truth.

  Chef appeared at the table. “Here,” he said, dropping half a baguette and a plate of duck pâté in front of each of them, then heading behind the line again.

  Robin raised an eyebrow at Steph. “I think that means you’re welcome back in September.”

  Stephanie nodded.

  “What are you doing when you get home?” asked Robin, reaching for a roll up.

  “I don’t know,” said Stephanie. “Maybe tree planting? Maybe Banff? I wish people would quit asking.”

  Robin nodd
ed. “What about next year?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stephanie, a little quickly.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just, you know, I always thought that when I graduated I’d go into law. And now I don’t know. I know I’m not going into law. But I don’t know what I want anymore.”

  Robin smiled. “Except you know you don’t want to work in a restaurant.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “Absolutely not. No. I mean. Sorry. I don’t mean it like that.”

  “That’s okay,” said Robin. “I never thought I wanted to either. But it turns out I’m good at it. And I happen to like it.”

  “You’re super good,” said Stephanie.

  “You’re not so bad,” said Robin.

  Stephanie went over to get a pitcher from the counter and brought it back to the table. She poured them both a glass of water. “Yeah. But—”

  “But you don’t want to be a waitress the rest of your life.”

  “I guess not.”

  They sat there for a moment without saying anything. Then Stephanie nodded and said, “Thank you.”

  Robin waved her hand dismissively, then wandered over to the kitchen door and peered out into the restaurant.

  “Hey,” she said. “Someone just came in. Will you handle it? Go tell him we’re closed. I’m done.”

  Stephanie was done too. But she didn’t say that. Robin had never asked her for anything. She got up and headed for the door.

  It was always odd at the end of the night. To see the dining room with the lights up, the tables empty, all the disorganized chairs, the cluttered tables, the half-finished coffees.

  She pushed the door open and stood there.

  She couldn’t see a soul. Kathie was the only one left. Kathie behind the bar, counting out. Kathie waved. Stephanie threw her an exaggerated shrug. And Kathie pointed at section one. Robin’s section.

  The guy was sitting at table two. The table by the fireplace. He had his back to Stephanie. There was something about the way he was sitting that seemed oddly familiar—like maybe she had served him before.

  She gave Kathie a big nod, like, Okay, I’m on it, and she headed over.

  She was halfway there, halfway across the room, looking at the table, thinking, I know this guy, when she sensed they weren’t the only ones in the section. She felt a movement to her right and she stopped, turned, and looked. It was Pamu. The dishwasher.

  He said, “Madame?”

  And she forgot all about the guy at table two, because Pamu was standing there with a dishcloth over his arm like he was a headwaiter or something.

  Pamu said, “May I show you your table, Madame?”

  The whole moment is a bit of a blur. The next thing she remembers, they were standing by table two and Pamu had pulled out a chair and the guy who’d been sitting there was standing up. And it was Chef. Pamu was holding out the chair opposite him and Chef was motioning for her to sit down, and she sat, and then she looked up at Pamu and then at Kathie, who was walking across the room toward them with a bottle of wine, and Chef said, “I hope you don’t mind. You were a little late. I took the liberty of ordering for you.”

  Andy was coming through the kitchen door. And everyone was behind him. They had a chicken liver and unagi terrine. The unagi was so sweet and the chicken liver so creamy. Japanese and French. Who else but Chef would think of combining them?

  When they’d finished it, Chef said, “You will have to excuse me.”

  He went into the kitchen and came out ten minutes later with a platter of raviolis. Big raviolis, the size of your palm, filled with cheese and floating in melted butter—the pasta airy and as light as a cloud.

  He had made ginger cake with lavender ice cream for dessert.

  Stephanie looked over at Chef and said, “That was delicious.”

  He smiled at her.

  It was the first time Stephanie had ever seen him smile.

  She felt encouraged.

  “I think you might have—I mean, this is really good. Maybe you have something here. Maybe you’ve hit your stride.”

  “Maybe you have too,” said Chef.

  Then he was standing up, raising his wineglass. “I want to make a toast,” he announced.

  “To Stephanie …”

  “To Stephanie, who is not defeated by her mistakes, who never abandons her workmates, and who can stand the heat in the kitchen.”

  Everyone applauded. It was her last night there. It was the first time she felt as if she was one of them.

  Someone said “Speech,” and someone seconded the motion.

  So she stood up and said, “I have learned so much from you guys. I’m going to miss you all.”

  She meant it.

  They were applauding as she sat down.

  Someone said, “See you in September.”

  Steph nodded as if to say yes, but then she stole a glance at Robin. Robin gave her an almost imperceptible shrug.

  “I’m going to miss you,” she said quietly to Robin about half an hour later as they were clearing up.

  “Well,” said Robin, “you know you’re welcome for dinner any time you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  “On one condition, of course.”

  “What’s that?” said Stephanie.

  Robin smiled. “That you leave a decent tip.”

  PRINCE CHARLES

  It was the softest of summer mornings—a Sunday in the middle of August—and Dave, in jeans and a T-shirt, was lying on the couch. There was a coffee at his elbow and a pile of magazines were strewn about. It was, in other words, a scene of serenity and repose, a holiday of sorts, a retreat.

  And then Morley appeared and said, “I think we have mice.”

  She might as well have announced the house was on fire.

  Dave levitated. He lifted right off the couch.

  He went from the horizontal to the vertical in such a blur that if you’d been there, if you’d seen it with your own eyes, you surely would have been unsure about what transpired. You might have asked yourself, Did he just go right over the back of the sofa?

  It sure seemed like it.

  One moment he was lying there as peacefully as a man could lie, the very personification of summer, and the next he was standing, staring at his wife, his agitation positively palpable.

  “I think we have mice,” Morley had said to horizontal Dave.

  “No we don’t,” he said, vertically.

  He almost sounded belligerent—as if he were accusing her of fabrication. He looked belligerent—vertical, but semi-crouched—as if preparing for a fight.

  But it wasn’t belligerence. It was fear. Or more accurately—terror. Dave is terrified of mice.

  You might think that coming from Cape Breton, coming from Big Narrows, Cape Breton, Dave would have long ago made an accommodation with rodents. After all, Big Narrows is more rural than urban. Most people heated with wood when Dave was growing up, many still do, so there are wood lots, and wood piles, and maple bushes, and farms. There are barns, and deer in the pastures, and bear on the mountain, and plenty of things rodentia. You might think that having grown up in the middle of all this, Dave would have accepted the presence of mice.

  But there had been an incident.

  “I was eight,” said Dave.

  Actually, he was twelve. He was twelve years old. And he woke up in the middle of a dark night—

  “Dark and stormy night,” said Dave. “It was stormy. Thunder and lightning.”

  But it wasn’t the thunder and lightning that woke him, it was the sense that there was something on his face.

  He was asleep—deep asleep—and he tried to stay that way. He brushed at the thing the way he might have brushed at, say, a moth, which is what he thought it was, until he realized through the fog of that long ago night that it was a furry rather than a fluttery thing. A mouse, not a moth. And he had a surge of adrenalin unlike any surge he’d had before or has had since. He s
napped awake, and there was a swat and a flurry—a fumble of boy and bedclothes—and then there was utter silence. Deep, dark, alone-in-the-middle-of-the-night silence.

  And Dave reached out in the still of it and turned on the lamp on his bedside table.

  Somehow he’d moved so fast, so suddenly, so unexpectedly that he’d plucked the thing off his face. He was sitting there staring at his clenched fist, too afraid to open it and too afraid not to.

  He’s had nightmares about that moment for years. Gangs of giant mice corner him in his closet—pick him up and pass him around.

  But that was later. What happened next that night was that he called his parents.

  And he called in a way that caused them to come running. When they got to his room, they found him sitting in his bed, holding his clenched fist as far away from the rest of him as he possibly could.

  His mother sat down on the edge of the bed and began to stroke his hair. His father stood by the door.

  Dave said, “I-have-a-mouse-in-my-hand-it-was-on-my-face-and-now-it-is-in-my-hand.”

  His mother said, “Sweetie, you’re dreaming.”

  Then she said, “Open your hand. You’ll see.”

  So he opened his hand.

  “See,” said Dave.

  His mother screamed.

  And Dave, in his surprise, threw the mouse.

  It landed in his mother’s hair.

  She didn’t react well. It’s hard to know, all these years later, whether it was the actual encounter with the mouse or the encounter with his mother that led to Dave’s intractable dread of rodents.

  But now, perhaps, you can be more understanding of why, when Morley came downstairs and said We have mice, it was terror, not belligerence, that responded.

  Of course, once the idea that they might have mice was introduced, the sorry slide into sleep disturbance began, followed, predictably enough, with episodes of sleep-deprived craziness.

  Morley, it’s worth pointing out, hadn’t actually seen any mice. But there was plenty of evidence. Once you started looking, it was everywhere.

  At first, Dave tried to affect a light-hearted nonchalance.

  “Maybe those aren’t mice,” he said when she led him into the kitchen and pointed at the counter. “Maybe we have an infestation of poppy-seed bagels.”