Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (22 page)

Once I reached high school, however, my father seemed to regard my feminism with a growing sense of bemusement. Whenever I sat at the dinner table, reading aloud from
Ms.
magazine and informing him that he and my brother were patriarchal oppressors, a big grin would seep onto his face.

“What? What’s so funny?” I’d say.

“Nothing,” he’d chuckle.

“Well, good,” I’d say, “because there’s nothing funny about clitoridectomies and workplace discrimination, you know.”

“I’m not saying there is,” said my father. “I just think it’s cute how you call me a patriarchal oppressor, then fifteen minutes later, you hit me up for money so you can go to the movies.”

Though I hated to admit it, he did have a point. I’d been so busy studying how oppressed I was that I’d somehow never gotten around to liberating myself from my five-dollar-a-week allowance.

Granted, to save for college, I’d spent summers working as a mother’s helper, providing unsuspecting families with my imaginative idea of child care. And during the school year, I juggled babysitting gigs, where, for a whopping 75 cents an hour, I rummaged through people’s record collections and cleaned them out of Diet Pepsi and Triscuits. But now, I realized, it was time to get a real job. A job that paid me with a check, not laundry quarters. A job that gave me a modicum of independence, dignity, and, most of all, feminist credibility.

Since the McDonald’s and Burger King in my neighborhood pretty much doubled as outpatient facilities, I applied to work at Haagen-Dazs.

“Why do you want to work at Haagen-Dazs?” the bored-looking manager asked, reading off a laminated script.

I considered responding:
To overthrow the patriarchy, of course.
But instead I answered, “Because I totally love Haagen-Dazs.”

I said this hoping to demonstrate my expertise and enthusiasm for the product. Instead, I ended up giving him the distinct impression that I’d spend every spare moment on the job drinking chocolate milkshakes in the supply closet—which was exactly what I’d been planning on doing, actually.

Blacklisted by Haagen-Dazs, I proceeded to have several equally fruitless interviews at David’s Cookies, Yogurt, Yogurt!, and a place called the Nut Hutch until finally landing an after-school job at a gourmet coffee bar called Shuggie’s. By that time I’d wised up and told the owner that, while I, personally, would sooner drink lighter fluid, I had no political objections to serving coffee to other people.

Shuggie’s was one of several food outlets inside the atrium of a midtown office building. Decorated from floor to ceiling in bone-white ceramic tile, it had about as much ambience as a giant urinal. Nevertheless, it did a brisk business selling specialty coffees, baked goods, and something called “gourmet minute-meals” to legions of frazzled and churlish office workers.

My job was to stand behind the counter—a space just slightly narrower than an economy class airplane seat—and fill orders at a breakneck pace alongside a crew of other servers. Until then, the totality of my food service experience had consisted of making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for screaming toddlers. At first, I worried I was under-qualified, but it soon became clear that most people in the throes of caffeine withdrawal are pretty much indistinguishable from three-year-olds. Certainly, they have the same pathetic lack of patience, manners, and reading skills. At Shuggie’s, a huge illustrated sign above the counter read:

WHAT IS A MINUTE-MEAL? 1 HOMEMADE SANDWICH + 1 SIDE SALAD + 1 BROWNIE.

In case you missed this, smaller replicas of the sign flanked the two pillars at the entrance and were laminated onto the counter. Yet nine times out of ten, customers barged in, planted themselves directly underneath the sign, squinted up at it, then said after a moment, “So, like, what exactly is a minute-meal?”

My first day on the job, I punched in my time card and tied on my apron with a flourish of pride. Ironically, while I’d always felt contempt for uniforms, just seeing a classmate in a paper hat had never failed to impress me. Occasionally, I’d run into kids from Stuyvesant at their after-school jobs at Papaya King or Blimpie’s. Standing behind counters in their regulation outfits, they never looked like the goof-offs who sat in the back row in trigonometry amusing themselves by clipping ballpoint pens to their lips. Rather, they seemed suddenly transformed into authority figures, into fine young men and women capable of shouldering great responsibilities and making fresh sandwiches.

Now, I thought triumphantly, I, too, was a member of this elite workforce. I was competent, payable, charged with duties that extended far beyond the menial demands of my high school. I was Working Woman: Hear me roar.

“Okay, any moron can do this job,” said Mercedes, the aspiring dancer-actress who’d been assigned to show me the ropes. “The only skills you might ever need are crowd control and anger management.”

As Mercedes showed me how to refill a napkin dispenser, she said, “When people wait on an ice cream line, they’re waiting for a treat. So they’re happy, they’re thinking, what flavor should I get? They don’t mind the anticipation. But a coffee line is for drug addicts. And drug addicts are assholes.”

She motioned toward a pudgy man with a tweed blazer and a salt-and-pepper beard who’d just bellied up to the counter.

“Take this piece of work. Thinks he’s King Henry the Eighth. He’s here all the time. Observe.” Mercedes slapped down her dishrag and sidled over to the register.

“Yes?” she said.

“This is what I want,” the man bellowed, not looking at her, but past her. “I want a large coffee with lots of half-and-half. But
heat
the half-and-half separately, will you, in that microwave over there? Set it for five seconds, then stir it, then heat it for another five seconds. Otherwise, the cream clumps. Last time someone did it for me here, they did it wrong and the cream was like cottage cheese. It was disgusting. Who puts cottage cheese in coffee? So heat the cream. Then
add
it to the coffee. And then,
before
you put on the lid, add one packet of Equal.”

Mercedes looked at him. “So, like, wait,” she deadpanned. “You said you wanted coffee?”

Potty-mouthed, sarcastic, and embroiled in petty melodramas, my fellow co-workers could not possibly have been more appealing. In addition to Mercedes, there was Alicia, a bass player who went to an “alternative high school” and wore so much black eyeliner she appeared to have been beaten-up permanently. Alicia worked quickly and sullenly, murmuring under her breath, “I swear to fucking God, if that guy asks me one more time what a minute-meal is, he’s going to learn how to use it as a rectal suppository.”

Timothy, the fourth horseman of our little Apocalypse, was studying to become a hair stylist. “Tah-dah,” he announced the first day he walked in. Snapping his fingers as if they were castanets, he pivoted around to model his newly peroxided hair and matching goatee. “So what do you think? Am I a California cabana boy or simply an albino Vincent Price?” Then he froze and gasped in mock horror. “Oh my god,” he cried. “Could I possibly be
more
gay?”

“Timothy, this is Susie,” Mercedes said, introducing us.

Timothy proffered his hand disdainfully. “Timothy Cashmere,” he announced. “The bold and the beautiful.”

“Susie Gilman,” I replied. “The subtle and chaste.”

“Oh,” Timothy grinned wickedly. “I like you.”

Surrounded by such madcap cohorts made me feel like we weren’t working so much as
performing.
In the caste system of midtown Manhattan office buildings, of course, we were practically Untouchables—second only to janitors and bike messengers, really. And yet, we remained convinced that we were actually vastly superior to everyone else. With their asphyxiating neckties, constricting panty hose, and pasty, haggard faces, our customers clearly held dull corporate jobs that wore away at their soul like iron filings. So okay, we might have been mopping floors and spilling coffee on them for minimum wage. But ultimately, we were headed someplace far bigger and more spectacular than theirs—to college, to beauty school, to the Broadway stage. Their jobs were like terminal illnesses. Ours, we bragged to one another, were merely temporary.

My first week, I almost couldn’t wait to get to Shuggie’s. I loved telling my friends after school, “Sorry. Gotta run. My shift starts in twenty minutes.” How grown-up did that sound? To boys I had crushes on, I casually let it drop where I worked. “It’s right near Grand Central Station,” I said offhandedly. “Stop by and I’ll hook you up with a killer brownie.”

Once I was on the job itself, I was swept up by the newness of it. The chronic, frenzied thrum behind the counter energized me, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee and baked goods almost gave me a contact high. A vast menagerie of humanity paraded in and out all afternoon, and I watched it with immense interest. The gum-cracking secretaries who gossiped about their love lives and manicures. The disheveled old woman who wandered from table to table pressing expired grocery coupons into the hands of bewildered strangers. The hordes of Japanese tourists who seemed delighted by the Lilliputian size of our minute-meals. The high-strung, chain-smoking security guard who regularly came in bug-eyed and beat jazz riffs on the countertop. The only people utterly lacking in visual interest were my bosses. Louie and Ida Shuggie were a paunchy, middle-aged couple who had been together so long that they’d started to look alike. Their faces were two collapsed puff pastries decorated with bifocals.

While everyone else ran around like maniacs, Louie Shuggie sat at a table in the corner sipping an extra-large cafÉ mocha and breathing through his mouth with audible
pfuffing
sounds. Once in a while, apropos of nothing, he’d glance at the mermaid tattoed on his forearm, as if to make sure it was still there, before calling out, “Did anyone check the coffee levels?” But otherwise, his one talent was to wait until the 3:30
P.M.
coffee rush—when we had customers lined up out the door and the kitchen took on the feel of a sauna—to grab one of us by the wrist, hand us his empty cup, and mew, like a baby, “A little more mocha, please?”

While Ida didn’t seem terribly inclined to help out either, she hovered over us like a gargoyle, calling into question every Styrofoam cup and plastic fork we discarded.

“What’s wrong with these coffee stirrers?” she’d say, picking wooden sticks out of the trash.

“Mercedes used them to unclog the drain.”

“So?” Ida said. “Rinse them off. It’s not like wood grows on trees, you know.”

Years of chain-smoking had left Ida’s voice froggy, giving it a gruff, reptilian quality that carried over to her entire personality. “Who left this dishrag on top of the microwave? Get it out of here,” was pretty much her standard greeting. As a feminist, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, seeing as we were both sisters in a Male Chauvinist World. But the truth was, except for Louie himself, I was hard pressed to find a more charmless person.

Ida seemed to have two all-consuming preoccupations. The first was “cuteness.” While for most of us, “cuteness” was an admirable quality, for Ida, it meant anyone who annoyed her—which was pretty much everybody.

“That plastic wrap distributor, he thinks he’s real cute,” she’d say, stamping out a cigarette. “Charges us for twenty cases, then only delivers eighteen. Well, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

“Getting what’s coming” seemed to be Ida’s standard punishment for anyone who was “cute.”

After badmouthing all the people in the food service industry who thought they were “real cute,” Ida inevitably turned her guns on us. To hear her tell it, our entire staff was nothing but a bunch of seasoned degenerates. “I don’t want any of you wisenheimers getting cute with me, either,” she’d glower, pointing at us with her cigarette clamped between her knuckles. “If you so much as
think
about helping yourself to anything here that’s not yours, you’ll get what’s coming to you so fast it’ll knock your teeth out. Got that?”

Alicia just looked at Ida stonily, but I had to avoid eye contact with Mercedes and Timothy to keep from cracking up. Ida’s obsession with honesty amused me to no end given how much Shuggie’s lied to its customers about the food that it sold. The “homemade” cookies were shipped in from a bakery out in Red Hook, while the “fresh” chicken salad and cole slaw were loaded up with so much MSG that eating them bordered on an out-of-body experience. The “seasonal” fruit salad came in cans the size of paint drums; it was our job to doctor it up by picking out the dead-giveaway maraschino cherries and replacing them with cut-up days-old bananas and apples. The only truly homemade thing at Shuggie’s was its freshly squeezed orange juice, and this was on the menu only because, two years ago, the’ Shuggies’ daughter, Rhonda, had gone on a juice diet.

“We plunked down four hundred bucks for this industrial-sized juicer, and then she gave up after only three weeks because she claimed it was turning her skin orange,” said Ida. “I told her, ‘For Chrissake, Rhonda, it’s not the fruit that’s turning your skin orange, it’s that bronzing creme you use.’ But oh no. She thinks she’s cute, my daughter. Would she listen? No. So now she’s still fat, her skin is still orange, and I’m stuck with the goddamn juicer.”

The other subject that seemed to obsess Ida was virginity.

“Don’t give it away, girls,” she lectured us at the end of every shift as we hung up our aprons and primped to meet our boyfriends. “Get a ring on your finger first. I am telling you. Your hymen for a diamond.”

When Mercedes and I snickered, she barked, “Don’t get cute with me. Take it from one who knows. Men won’t pay the cow if she gives milk for free.”

“Oooh,” said Timothy delightedly, raising his hand. “Who wants to field
that
one?”

“Shut up, Timothy. I’m not talking to you,” Ida said. “I’m giving the girls here some valuable advice they’re not going to hear from those ridiculous, hairy-legged women’s libbers out there.”

Mercedes nudged me and whispered, “Right. Because we all know how well Ida’s advice works for her.”