Regrettable Things That Happened Yesterday

by Jennani Durai

  Ria read the entire handbook (The Employee’s Guide to Transporting Customers to Mexico) while in bed that same night, unsure if she should have reached the decision to quit at the very first page. She predicted that she would arrive at work the next day to mass resignations, but funnily enough, everyone stayed, although they never discussed the handbook amongst themselves. They seemed to have lumped it together with the PowerPoints and pep talks and other strange things Dave did that they largely ignored. The latest of these he announced that morning: all employees would be given Spanish names on their nametags. Ria’s name was mercifully spared: Dave had thought about changing it to “María” for a while, but later declared her real name “Hispanic enough”. His own Spanish name was Dario.

  Despite being chosen for possessing a certain sort of appearance, the employees of Guacamolay! were really an assortment of ethnicities. They didn’t broach the subject for a week or two, but then someone suddenly broke the ice and they all started asking each other. Used to a lifetime of being asked “What are you?”, the irritation of the question made them avoid asking it of anyone else until put in the bizarre situation of being surrounded by people with faces as puzzling as their own. Most of them turned out to be of mixed parentage like Ria, but only one other girl shared her particular blend of Caucasian and Indian genes. Many were part-Malay, some were Chindian, and only one could boast actual Hispanic lineage. Cheryl/Carla was one-sixteenth Spanish, a fact she brought up often. The other employees felt it was too small a percentage to really count.

  Their ages also spanned quite a range, from the 18-yearolds in the kitchen to the 45-year-old waiting tables with Ria, but it made no difference to their camaraderie. The 45-year-old, Hana/Ana, was a mum who had another job and was taking evening classes to get a degree in business, while the teenage twins with interchangeable names were planning to work for six months and then travel the world with the money they earned. A couple of others were like Ria, taking gap years to save up for school. One man in his thirties, Joel/Julio, was working in the kitchen to see if he had what it took to strike out on his own with a restaurant, and Cheryl/Carla was just passing time until she could leave on a yearlong humanitarian project in January. Ria had expected to have nothing in common with her co-workers, thinking that they’d either be foreigners, resigned to a lifetime of clearing tables in Singapore, or people fresh out of JC or Poly, whiling away the time and waiting to be struck by inspiration on what to do with their lives. But everyone here had a plan, a goal which the restaurant was just a stepping stone to; dreaming of their lives post-Guacamolay! was one of the ways they got through the day. She liked coming to work with these people, thrust together through sheer coincidence of their appearances, and their company was enough to stop her from looking for another job every time Dave gave another employee presentation.

  By the second month they were all close—a rag-tag bunch of Mexican approximates. It didn’t matter that the restaurant was not doing great. They all called each other by their Spanish names and greeted each other in the morning with ¡Buenos días! and a smirk. Joel/Julio occasionally let them snack on tortilla chips in the kitchen, and every morning started with the full low-down on the twins’ various nightclub exploits or the latest bad behaviour of Cheryl/Carla’s good-for-nothing boyfriend whom they all agreed she should break up with. The weekly meetings after closing were more bearable now that they were friends; they snorted openly during Dave’s presentations and blamed it on a chair scraping across the floor, or exchanged whispered horror stories of their worst customers of the day.

  On self-presentation:

  As the face of our restaurant, waiters and waitresses are very important. Congratulations on making the cut! Please wear only the uniforms provided and make every effort to appear clean and neat. Women are encouraged to wear their hair in high buns, and the only jewellery allowed are large silver hoop earrings. Men are encouraged to slick their hair back with gel. Please learn how to pronounce every item on the menu correctly (a full list of the correct Spanish pronunciations of all dishes is presented in Appendix A). It may be useful to memorise certain phrases, such as “Hola” (pronounced oh-la), “Gracias” (pronounced grass-yas), and “Es muy delicioso” (pronounced es mooi de-lee-see-oh-so). Under no circumstances will I tolerate a mispronunciation of the word “guacamole”. I have already given you a pronunciation guide in the name of the restaurant! I also personally dislike people who mispronounce “quesadilla”.

  A review in The Sunday Times came out in the third month of Guacamolay!’s existence and it was not horrendous. It was mildly favourable, in fact, and Dave went insane with excitement. Ria walked in the following morning to find newspapers spread all over one of the tables, flipped open to the same page with the review cut out. She didn’t want to ask what was going on, but as she bent to pick up the scraps littered all around the table, she saw that Dave had affixed the review to the centrepiece of the table, and not just this one, but every table in the restaurant. She bit her lip and decided to tell Dave that perhaps they could just put one on a bulletin board, or on a sign in the window, when she saw that he had done both already.

  Cheryl/Carla was in the kitchen, slumped in a corner, massaging her temples. When she spotted Ria, she pointed behind her. Dave had also covered the employee notice board with copies of the review. “Does he think if we read it, we’ll want to pay money to eat here too?” she asked. She took off her apron and balled it up, as though ready to throw it in like the proverbial towel.

  Ria waited: this was a ritual, and they all took turns to do it. “It wasn’t even that good a review,” Cheryl/Carla continued in a more hushed tone. “Did you read it? They said we were ‘above average as far as Mexican restaurants go’. What a glowing recommendation! Dios mío,” she said, and then shook out her apron again and put it back on. Ria reached over to help her smoothen out the straps and tie them at the back.

  But they couldn’t deny that the review brought in customers. The team worked harder than it ever had, unused as they were to the rush. The increase in customers also meant more questions. Contrary to what Dave had anticipated in his handbook, the most common questions were not about the food, but about the staff themselves. Dave’s attempts to pass them off as Mexican appeared to have worked too well, the Spanish names on their nametags being the final, convincing touch. Almost every day, one of them was warmly welcomed to Singapore by a customer, or asked why they had decided “to come such a long way to work”. The staff convened an emergency employee-only meeting headed by Joel/Julio to discuss if they should tell the truth in these instances, or lie to keep up Dave’s hard-won pretence of authenticity. They decided that Hana/Ana should bring it up at a meeting.

  When she did, Dave was thrilled, and forbade them from telling the truth. He instituted a new rule: waitstaff should approach every new table by introducing themselves in Spanish, using their Spanish names. They spent the rest of the night memorising how to do this, and reading the Wikipedia page on Mexico to pre-empt basic questions.

  On making recommendations:

  Every member of the staff should be able to make recommendations to any customer. Too often, I have been to restaurants and asked a waiter what their favourite menu item is, only to find out they have never tried the food. As such, the chefs will cook a different selection of dishes before every Friday’s meeting especially for staff to sample (sample only please, we will not be cooking enough for everyone to have a full meal) and afterward, staff will be required to write down their impressions of the dishes and rank them according to their own preferences. Each week, with more dishes sampled, staff will be asked to re-evaluate their rankings. You are permitted to sort dishes into tiers. Staff will be randomly selected at each meeting to justify some of their rankings, and describe dishes as they would to customers. Descriptions of dishes should include knowledge of the cooking techniques involved as well as where the produce is from. Avoid overcompensating by over-use of words such as “scrumptious” and “mo
uth-watering”.

  *

  Sales and customer figures were included in every Friday’s presentation as part of Dave’s plan to increase the employees’ sense of ownership in the establishment. But even if they weren’t, the way the tables started emptying out within a month of the newspaper review was a clear indication of the direction the restaurant was heading. Ria knew it, and so did everyone else. They started spending weeknights playing cards in the kitchen, and sometimes they’d even take off their aprons and sit chatting in the booths so that passers-by might think the restaurant had happy customers. Dave, however, was not gifted in this department, so they sat through six more weeks of his presentations on the restaurant’s poor takings— THE HIGHER THE GOAL, THE HARDER THE CLIMB, THE SWEETER THE SUCCESS—before any sort of panic started showing in his eyes.

  To his credit, he didn’t break down that first night the panic set in. He went on with the presentation, then holed himself up in his office in the restaurant for the rest of the week. He would be there before the staff arrived and after the last person had left. That whole week, they didn’t see him until it was time for the employee meeting. Dave showed up immaculately groomed, with a pressed shirt, hair slick with gel and eyes wild with no sleep. He started by apologising for forgetting to include a quote for this week’s meeting, and the staff were sorry too, because at least it would have meant the very first slide didn’t contain figures of the restaurant’s insurmountable losses.

  Dave soldiered on through the presentation, insisting that the fact he had placed the loss numbers in red, and the fact that they were so very large, was no reason to give up quite yet, that it was always hard for new restaurants, even one as stellar as Guacamolay!, and that the restaurant scene in Singapore was a tough one to break into, but it, like all things, was cyclical…

  Ria exchanged looks with the rest as Dave finally trailed off and collapsed into his chair, which rolled comically away from them. Joel/Julio started reading off the numbers on the PowerPoint and making calculations out loud to distract everyone else, but it was a feeble effort in the face of a man who had just started blubbering noisily.

  “It’s over,” Dave said, between angry sobs. “It’s just over. I wanted it so much.”

  “Well, let’s not give up yet,” Joel/Julio said. “You know, they say it takes at least a year—”

  “It’s not just the numbers. There’s something else I didn’t tell you guys. All of us may be under investigation by the Government. I have no idea how it got so big.” He buried his face in his hands.

  Several people gasped as the room stirred uneasily. Ria’s stomach clenched and her mind flew to the thought that this might stop her from leaving for school.

  “I thought it was nothing at first, and I kept thinking it would be resolved, but I just got an e-mail that said someone had filed a complaint against us for ‘discriminatory hiring practices’.” Dave’s use of air quotes showed what he thought of the grievance. “They say we have to be shut down for a week or so while the investigation is pending. With the numbers like they are right now, there’s no way we’ll make it through having to close for even a few days.”

  He stood up and screamed, “My dream is dead!” before collapsing back into the chair.

  Ria wanted to shake him and yell: This is all your fault, you and your stupid ideas, and now we are all out of jobs and under an investigation! Why is your dumb dream more important than mine?

  But instead she joined the rest of the waitstaff, who flocked around Dave like his well-trained Spanish hens, making comforting noises and reaching out to touch him. “Ay ay ay,” sighed the twins, while Hana/Ana patted him on the shoulder and cooed, “Pobrecito.” Ria swooped down to hug him from behind and whispered into his ear: “Que será, será.”

  On guacamole itself:

  Our restaurant is named after this delicious avocadobased food that we serve with every meal, so it is imperative we get it right. We will use only the ripest of avocados, each of which will be tested personally by me upon the arrival of each shipment. We will only bring in avocados from Mexico, to maintain the taste of the first, true guacamole I tasted during Spring Break ’09 in Cancún. They are more expensive but worth it, to distinguish Guacamolay!’s guacamole from the other restaurants’ guacamole, and thereby distinguish Guacamolay! from the other restaurants. If that sentence is confusing, read it again. If Mexican avocados are in short supply, we might use Australian avocados (in dire circumstances) but never, under any conditions, Indonesian avocados. We will close our restaurant if those are the only avocados available to us. I will taste the guacamole prepared every day, to ensure that the standards are high, and similar to those found at the Grand Oasis Cancún All-Inclusive Resort. If I am unable to be there, Carla, who is 1/16th Spanish, will taste the guacamole in my stead.

  Let us not let down the good name of our restaurant with bad guacamole. ¡Viva Guacamolay!

  PG-13

  We waited for Char to turn 13, even though her birthday was in September and movies we wanted to watch kept coming out all year. We made no effort to conceal our bitterness towards poor Char, who took the brunt of our ill-conceived pact to wait to watch a PG-13 movie until all six of us were officially teenagers. The pact forbade us to watch these movies with our parents, but I secretly succumbed when Frequency came out in July, and subsequently heaped a little less abuse on Char.

  When we returned to school after the September holidays, we scoured the movie listings in the newspapers every day, but none of the films had the rating we needed. “There’s nothing out in September,” Lena would announce every day in the classroom as we put our bags down before morning assembly. She would stare pointedly in Char’s direction, and we would all traipse down the stairs in glum silence while Char suggested in a falsely bright voice that the next day might bring new offerings. It didn’t for a while, and then suddenly one Thursday, there it was: not a blockbuster, but a Hollywood movie all the same, one with an actress we recognised, and it bore the all-important designation: PG-13.

  We were breathless that morning with excitement— and relief, for one of us—and made plans to watch the movie the next Friday, the day after a Lit test. We chattered about it non-stop that day, our unfair resentment towards Char finally dissipated. So I was completely blindsided when Lena cornered me the next day in the toilet and told me we had to kick Char out of the group.

  “What, because her birthday is so late?” I asked.

  “No, because she lies,” Lena said calmly, as if that was that.

  She was leaning against the door, possibly to prevent anyone else from coming in during this conversation, and I prolonged my hand-washing and drying to avoid responding. When the silence became too protracted I forced myself to speak, since Lena appeared to be unconcerned and checking her nails.

  “What does she lie about?” I asked.

  “Everything,” Lena said, without looking up at me. “About me to Rachel. About Tina to Shu-en. About you to me.”

  I felt a weight in my stomach. “What does she say about me?”

  “Just lies. I know they’re not true,” Lena said, finally looking me in the eye. “And I know you don’t believe the things she says about us to you.”

  She held my gaze as I evaluated the statement. Char did complain about the other members of the group to me, but I thought she had considered me her confidante. Her comments weren’t all that vicious, anyway. Just little grievances—Tina never contributes to group projects, Shu-en likes to show off, I’m not sure if Lena likes me. They hadn’t struck me as particularly slanderous, and certainly not outright lies—the last one, in fact, seemed like a legitimate concern—and I hadn’t really blamed her. But I hadn’t counted on her talking about me behind my back, and I felt a sharp surge of anger.

  With Lena though, I had to pick my words carefully.

  “We haven’t been very nice to Char,” I said, although the collective pronoun was exceedingly generous. “Maybe we could talk to her, tell her we
heard these things she was saying about us, and then she can tell us to our faces what she’s upset about.”

  Lena snorted. “Always the peacemaker, Priya. She’s out there gossiping about us now and you want to sit down and talk. No, we’re kicking her out. I’ve talked to the others, and now I’m talking to you.”

  I felt a bit miffed that I was the last of the group to know, but I had more important things to clarify. “What about the movie then?”

  Lena impatiently flicked her bangs out of her face. “Yes, that stupid movie. It’s only because of that movie pact that we haven’t done this earlier. We swore we would watch the movie together. Well, once that’s done, the pact’s done, and there’s nothing really holding us together. If we’d kicked her out earlier we would still have to honour the pact, you know, and that would have been awkward.”

  Apparently, Lena took her vows very seriously. I wondered how long she had been plotting this particular move.

  I stood in silence for a little while, wondering why no one had come to use the toilet, or whether someone had tried, but mistook Lena’s weight against the door for it being locked.

  “Do we need to do it at all?” I finally asked. “The school year is almost over. We won’t see her for a few months, and when we come back to school she might be different.”

  Lena sighed as though she were dealing with a small child, and I sensed her growing frustration. I was torn between defending Char and preserving my good standing with Lena.

  “Look, Priya, right now, we sort of know what she’s been saying to people. We don’t know what else she might say, especially to people outside our group, or teachers. If we make a stand now, kick her out, and let people know she’s a liar, then when she does say something big, they’ll know it can’t be true,” she said.