Dirty Work

by Anna Maxymiw

  Beside me, there’s an unsteady shriek in the canoe. I look over and watch as the boat totters back and forth, on the edge of capsizing. Emma falls out, her pale, slim legs flying up into the air as she plunges under. Alisa, who is sitting on the gunwale, leans her head back and guffaws like a cartoon character, but doesn’t realize that this changes the weight of the canoe, and then she is falling backward, too, still giggling as her blonde head goes under. The girls who threw their towels in the canoe cluck, but the scene is too funny not to smile. The overturned boat sits like a giant fish beside us, hull glowing and exhaling and inhaling with the gentle movement of the water.

  I tilt my face to the sun and realize that this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Setting on the straight, bright edge of the horizon, the sun looks like a seed ready to explode. We’re in the water at the exact right time. In only a few minutes, the lake will become fire, and when we slide into a breaststroke and dip our heads under the water, we will be diving into sheer orange and red and gold gloss, frothing the glass surface of the water up into a spray of opaline glow. We will be alight.

  I take my bathing suit off, feeling the water rush over my stomach and my shoulders and the curve of my hips. The other girls whoop and whistle, and some take their suits off too. We hear the boys crashing through the camp toward us. And then we all cock our heads to the side, uncanny and ready and smiling. Slip under the water at the same time, sleek naiads in the glow.

  SAM

  The lodge kitchen is an intimate space, so crowded that girls often have to sidle past each other, feeling the press of pelvises and breasts to backs, murmuring softly when the heat of bodies connects. This room is the true heart of the lodge. It’s the place where the girls come together every morning and night, where we sweat and swear in our efforts to get the guests fed and watered in time for a day out on the lake or in time for bed. The servers and Sam, the cook, pull off miracles every day, all in this tiny area.

  The dishpit is where the kitchen’s in-door is located. Servers burst in and dump guests’ sticky, used plates and cutlery onto the housekeeper on dish duty, who’s usually silently ruing her life choices while elbow deep in bleach water filled with scummy bowls and spoons and mugs. To hand off orders to Sam and pick up plates that are ready, servers have to move through the dishpit into the main kitchen, an area that’s really not much bigger than the back girls cabin. There are two huge fridges against one wall, and the range against the other. To top it off, a sharp-cornered metal table occupies most of the middle of the room. Because the kitchen is so small, it’s a stressful place full of complex timing and choreography. There are different cuts of meat that need to be cooked to different desires; different pans of eggs that need to be turned into scrambled, sunny side up, over medium; young women spinning around one another, their ponytails whipping behind them. But no matter what’s going on, no matter how chaotic, everyone is aware that the entire kitchen is Sam’s domain, from one end to the other, up and down, every shelf, pot, rack, spatula, and knife.

  We were warned that Sam has a particular brand of emotional hazing that he inflicts on the housekeepers.

  “Just show him your mettle,” Jack said. “Tell him ‘bring it on!’ and he’ll probably respect you. You’ll have to do a lot of dishes, but he’ll respect you. Probably.”

  “No,” Tiff said. “You just want to avoid eye contact. Bring your headphones with you on dishpit days.”

  “It starts off fine,” Alex said. “But then it’s not.”

  “I like him,” Kevin said. “He gives me brownies.”

  “This is my third year here,” Alex continued with an eye roll, “and he still calls me that girl.”

  * * *

  Each day is made up of a chain of tasks, and that’s how time pulls us through even when our bodies are weary and we feel like we’re about to break down. We survive by counting the minutes from one chore to the other, relishing the work we like and grumbling through the work we hate. We all have favourite duties. I still look forward to laundry days the most: it’s a day to hide and read, sitting cross-legged on top of the dryer as I wait for my towels to be done. Other girls like bartending, because it’s the only day we’re able to sleep past 6 a.m., or they like serving, slinging salads and rolls and testing their memories by remembering guests’ orders without a notepad. For all of our differences, though, there’s one common denominator—nobody likes dishpit.

  Even though the camp has a capacity for a maximum of sixty guests—and twenty staff members, give or take—we don’t have an industrial dishwasher, so all the dishes are done by hand by one girl. Every pot, pan, plate, piece of cutlery is washed with soap first, then bleach water, and finally rinsed in hot water. Everything is hand-dried, put back on the shelves, and then used again within thirty minutes. Wash. Repeat. All day, every day, from breakfast service at 7 a.m. to the end of dinner service around 9 p.m.

  “It’s hard,” I tell Pea. We’re sitting beside each other on a hot afternoon, watching Jack as he sorts his tackle box. I know that Pea knows working with Sam is hard; he’s been a dockhand for years, he’s heard it all. But I can’t help but unleash a little. “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. And Sam is so…” I’m paranoid about saying anything too loudly, since sound carries and I never know anyone’s whereabouts.

  I press my hands to my eyes. I’m not crying, but I’m not okay, either. It seems like Sam is getting worse by the week, as if he plans how best to break down every girl’s brave facade with every dishpit day. In the first weeks of the summer, he was giving us the normal things to wash, just pans and tongs and forks. It was hard, but it was predictable. Then, he asked us to wash pieces of the range that we’ve never seen before, metal that was black and burnt from years of use. Then, he asked us to mop the kitchen three or four times a day, wanted us to beat the filthy mats over the clothesline in the glare of the midday sun. Then, he asked us to kneel in the corners of the kitchen, using our bleach-ragged nails to pry dirt out of the space where the floor meets the wall. Now it’s an intense sense of dread every time I wake up on a Thursday morning and realize it’s my day in the pit.

  I only have about thirty minutes with the guys before I have to go back in. I’m worried and overtired, and I should be lying down and saving my strength for the impending dinner service. Normally I’d try to nap, but it’s sweltering today; the heat is so unctuous and presses so hard on the napes of our necks that Pea and I loll our heads, trying to catch as much wind off the lake as possible. The heat seems to have slowed him down, a rare sight, and his taciturn nature has melted a bit.

  “You’re lucky this year,” Pea says, his words slow like he’s chewing.

  “Why?”

  Before Pea can answer, Jack bends over to pick up a lure he’s dropped on the bottom of his boat, and his shirt rides up, exposing his ass crack.

  “You need a new belt,” I yell, but the air is so thick it feels like the words just hang there.

  “Fuck you, Big Rig,” he hollers back in a sing-song way. “Don’t look at my ass.”

  “I’ve literally already seen it,” I snap.

  “Yeah? Did you see any willnots?”

  Pea starts shaking with laughter beside me.

  “What. The fuck. Is. A willnot?” I wish my words were harsher, but I’m too tired to give them the bite I want.

  Jack straightens himself and grins. “A ball of shit, stuck in your ass hair, that willnot come out, no matter how much you wipe!” He looks like he expects a drum rimshot to accompany what he clearly thinks is a very funny joke.

  I clap both hands to my eyes again, as if I’d be able to shield myself from that image by blocking out the visual of Jack laughing, his big teeth clicking and catching the sun. “No!”

  “No what? No, you didn’t see any? Bet you looked pretty hard, eh, Big Rig?”

  Pea’s full-out guffawing. I turn back to him, eager to change the subject. “Why am I lucky? When it comes to Sam?”

  “In th
e past,” he says, swallowing another laugh, “Sam’s been so much worse. He hasn’t made anyone cry this summer, has he?”

  “Don’t think so,” I say. “At least not face to face.”

  “He used to be…bad. He used to be pretty bad.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jack pipes up, laying a few lures on his boat seats. I watch his long fingers as he sorts through the tackle. A bead of sweat starts from my hairline and rolls down my spine, getting absorbed in the waist of my shorts.

  I should be happy that Jack is being fairly nice to me. Today is a good day. Some days, the way he talks to me is so jarring: “Heya, Big Rig! You fucking up your chores again or what?” “Jesus, Big Rig. We could use you as a dockhand instead of goddamned Aidan. Aidan, you big fucking idiot, look at how much weight Big Rig can move in her wheelbarrow!” “Big Rig sucks, Big Rig sucks, fuck you, Big Rig!—” sung along aggressively to a strummed guitar in the guideshack.

  Our interactions are mostly like brother and sister. We needle, him far more expertly than me, but there’s an undercurrent of something else, something mean and proud, something that makes me uncomfortable in a sick, pleasurable way. I make no mistake about Jack: his curiosity about me, if it exists at all, is tainted with a deep dislike of my city life (“Fucking Toronto. Shit drivers, shit people”), of my arts degree (“Might as well be doing arts and crafts, Big Rig”), of my potential for brittleness (“I usually make at least one housekeeper cry by this point in the summer. Wonder when it’s going to be your turn, huh?”), but most of all, I think, my refusal to bend to him. There’s a rage we seem to bring out in each other, but it’s balanced by the fact that no one on staff makes me laugh as hard as he does. His humour is brutal, clever, exquisite in a rapid-fire way; he makes jokes at everyone’s expense, and all I can do is breathe deeply and let myself be carried by the waves of invective. If you’re good to Jack, he will keep you grinning; if you’re on the outs with Jack, he will punish you.

  Pea looks at me, and I realize that I’ve been staring. I snap my attention back to him, his sweaty eyebrows, the sheen on his cheekbones and chin. It’s so fucking hot. He puts his hand on my shoulder; I can feel his heat, and I close my eyes. Maybe I’m understanding him a little better; he’s older than even me, has worked alongside years of idiots, I’m sure. Pea toils hard, quietly, usually without complaint, and he expects the rest of us to do the same. The housekeepers’ mouthy languor—that delicious cruelty that most young women inherit from society, from fear, from pack mentality—is naturally annoying to him. I think he wonders why we all can’t scrub, hammer, chop, rake, haul without whining, without unleashing. But Pea is the aberration; his stoicism makes him the reliable one, but it also sets him apart when we’re running wild and giddy. He does unwind, though; he likes rum, likes a good dirty joke, delivers one-liners with a quiet confidence that keeps his audience silent and thinking for a moment before the joke truly lands and we catch up and gasp with laughter.

  I make a sound with my throat, thankful for this moment of quiet. I want this lull to continue; it feels like we’re stuck in a delicious bubble, our limbs weighed down with the curtain of heat. If I had my way, I’d spend all summer like this, propped up under a tree, exchanging gentle banter with men who know far more than me about this place and this history.

  “You’ll be okay,” Pea says, and I nod with my eyes closed.

  * * *

  Sam’s face slants forward. His hair is silvering, his shoulders sloped. His arms and legs are skinny, but he’s solid around the middle. His physicality doesn’t add up. He moves in tics and bursts, energy propelling its way out of him through herky-jerky movements. Any time he’s feeling awkward, he snaps his head back and laughs as loud and hard as he can to the ceiling while holding a soup pot in front of his stomach like a shield.

  He likes to take the clean, empty slop buckets—where we throw leftover food—and put them over his head while cooking, which I actually find particularly hilarious. He takes the pasta pots and holds them above his stomach and then his head, chanting “potbelly, pothead” as quickly as possible, right in my face, only a few inches between our mouths, and I genuinely laugh at this, too. He makes convincing-sounding fart noises using one side of his mouth, and every time a guide enters the kitchen, he pretends that they’re so flatulent he has to ask them to leave, then laughs wildly with his head thrown back, and I can’t help but join in.

  One morning, Sam asks me if I know how to administer CPR to an AIDS patient. When my answer is no, he shows me: he mimes stomping on a prone person’s chest with one foot, and then purses his lips and blows softly downward from his upright position. The insinuation is that he’s loath to touch his imaginary patient. I’m loath to be stuck in the kitchen with him at this moment. I have to laugh because he expects me to laugh, but my guts are snaky. So often, his jokes are fast and dirty and hard to keep up with, and I feel like I’m constantly being bounced around in the eddy of them.

  He holds conversations with people I can’t see; he leans his head forward, dipping his chin and raising his eyebrows, chuckling in commiseration or appreciation. He puts his lips to the screen of the kitchen window and whispers like he’s working a drive-thru intercom. And any time I start to get disturbed by these interactions, he distracts me, singing “milk, milk, lemonade, around the corner fudge is made,” pointing to his body with a pair of greasy tongs, skittering off to check on his soup on the stove.

  If he stuck with his fake conversations, we’d all be fine. But he doesn’t. I find that I can’t listen to my headphones while working dishpit, because he has a tendency to sneak up on me and nearly hook his chin over my shoulder. He likes to talk right into my ear, his upper chest a few inches from my upper back. My only defence in these situations is laughter—I like to try to laugh as loud as he does. If I start laughing, he starts laughing, and everything is okay.

  I still can’t figure him out. He’s a pinball, unpredictable, at one minute crooning and soothing, at the next yelling and slamming things on all the metal surfaces within his reach. Maybe his temperament is all an elaborate ruse, designed to confuse his kitchen companions. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we all need to find our own ways to deal with him, to make our days in the dishpit palatable.

  * * *

  Lodge food is cyclical. Predictable. The guests eat on a seven-day schedule. Chicken, turkey, prime roast, steak, ribs, chicken, ribs: we serve the same meals all summer.

  Food supply to the lodge is limited. All of the food and supplies have to be flown in by floatplane. Shipping costs about a dollar a pound—a Beaver flight is about $1,200, packed full or not—and so every shopping trip is carefully planned. Henry doesn’t just send someone back in Cochrane to the grocery store; he orders directly from a supplier. Food arrives on our dock in thick white cardboard boxes. Nothing looks right. Instead of deep-green romaine hearts, northern lettuce is white, ragged shreds of watery fibre packaged in a giant plastic bag. The apples are tiny, with brown spots, and they’re always McIntosh, always tooth-cringingly tart. Every condiment is no-name, and therefore tastes a little off-putting: ketchup that’s too sweet, mustard that’s too strong. Besides the apples, the only other pieces of fruit we ever get are small, hard bananas that go mushy in a day, or bitter, seedy oranges.

  Sometimes, we sit at the dinner table and talk about the food we miss most. We rhapsodize about asparagus, raspberries, artichokes. We try to remember what blueberries taste like as we shovel porridge into our mouths. We murmur about greens.

  “Broccoli,” Aubrey says around a mouthful of oats.

  “Never thought I’d miss broccoli before this fucking summer,” I say into my bowl.

  “I’d kill someone for a peach,” Syd says. There are hums of agreement around the table. Peaches, nectarines, big fat oranges. “Like, actually fucking kill a dude.”

  “Kale,” Pete says quietly.

  “Ice cream,” Emma adds.

  “Strawberries,” Alex says with a sigh.
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br />   “Milk,” I say. I drank milk by the carton at home, but I haven’t seen it in weeks. We rely on cans of evaporated milk, or those tiny creamers that never have to be refrigerated. A few days ago, a group of guests brought up their own milk for coffee in the morning and left a cup of it in the fridge after they flew out. I found it before Sam could get his hands on it when I was searching for a place to put a bowl of tuna pasta salad. I turned to Robin, who was wiping a counter. We stared at each other for just a few seconds before lunging; we stood over the sink and drank from one cup in alternating gulps, gasping between each pleasurable swallow. Now I have a taste for it again, and it’s driving me crazy.

  Seeing food in its most voluminous denominations is disconcerting—this food is odd and large. Peanut butter arrives waxy and thick, in large plastic buckets that we need two hands to lift and move, and is spooned into reused Skippy jars in order to fool the guests into thinking we use brand names. Behind the lodge, on the dirt path, housekeepers pour canola oil from huge drums into grimy, recycled handle jugs. Meat is delivered in frozen, fatty slabs; cheese comes in heavy blocks; bread exists, wrapped in plastic, in squished boxes.

  Every time the floatplanes come in with groceries—offhandedly referred to as “gross”—the girls scuttle out of our bunks. The pilots have been told to do a fly-by, which is a low buzz over the camp in order to make enough racket to wake even the sleepiest girls from their afternoon naps. Whenever I hear the familiar, dreadful bee-drone of the Beaver planes, I slither out of my bed and shove my feet into whatever shoes are closest. From all corners of camp the housekeepers run, dishevelled and bleary, down to the dock, and wait for the idling plane to putter up to us and cut its engine. The dockhands pull the packages out of the back of the plane and we help load the food into wheelbarrows. We push our loads up the precarious ramp that connects the interlock dock and the shore: not all housekeepers are good at balancing; apparently, cans of beer, when ejected from a wheelbarrow and into the shallows of the lake, float.