by Anna Maxymiw
Sam not only has to feed the guests, he has to feed the staff, too. Our meals become reruns: Little Henrys; grilled cheese made with the plasticky orange stuff that comes in individually wrapped slices; fajitas with mystery meat; salty vegetable soup; greasy pancakes. If Sam is feeling generous, he doesn’t lard on the cooking oil. If he’s in a good mood, there may even be a salad. If Sam is angry, for whatever reason he’s made up to create the drama of the day, he throws the grilled cheese onto the baking trays in sloppy piles. He burns the pizzas, or gives us three-day-old tuna pasta salad. Some days, he tells me I’m in charge of deciding what the rest of the staff gets to have for lunch. If I hesitate too long, or if I pick something he doesn’t like or doesn’t want to make, he tells me they’re not going to get anything to eat at all. Even on the days when we get good lunches—tortillas, or leftover chicken made into sandwiches, or grilled cheese that isn’t overdone and is piled neatly—we still remember that everything we’re eating is so unhealthy it’s probably doing permanent damage to our bodies.
Still, as much as we bitch, and as much as food rules our lives with an unpleasantly tight grip, the staff dining room—tiny, peeling, and shabby—is our hub. Our heartland. When we’re all jammed in around the table, there isn’t room to move without brushing against each other. My elbows bump into Alisa’s ribcage, my forearms touch Aidan’s utensils. It’s up close, too close. Not close enough.
* * *
“Tiff,” I plead.
She looks up from painting her nails. We have an afternoon off and all the guests are out on the lake, so we’re sitting at the tables near the dock, sunning ourselves like lazy cats. Behind us, Emma and Alisa are attempting to coax the chipmunks into eating peanuts from their palms. Every few minutes, the sweet air is punctuated with their laughter. It’s funny, and hearing them giggle is reassuring. Beside them, Connor is watching and taking pictures. He’s trying to persuade the girls to let him trap a chipmunk in a tennis-ball can, and they’re shooing him away with practised hands.
Tiff’s nails are painted orange. The colour looks good in the sunlight. I squint down at her.
“Yeah?”
“Are you in the kitchen with us tonight?” She stops, thinks, creases her brow. “Oh, yes. It’s Alex’s night off.”
I exhale with relief.
There’s something about Tiffany that calms me. Of the two head housekeepers, she gets less wound up about lodge duties than Alex, and since I run anxious, this is helpful. She has the ability to shrug off Sam’s hurtful comments, to ignore Henry’s drill-bit voice. It’s a strategy that serves her well, and I know I can learn from her.
But there’s a partition between us, one of those divisions that’s created by a misplaced glance or a misfired joke and then lingers, unsaid and unaddressed, between women, feeding off of and creating insecurity. And it has the potential to fester. I don’t know how to manoeuvre around it, and I don’t think there’s any way to lessen it, to reach over and grab her hand and pull her to me, to say I really like you, I trust you, please also trust me.
There’s a lot about her that makes me feel like less of a woman. She wears makeup well, has beautiful long hair with ends that never seem frizzled or split. She never looks like she’s at the end of her rope. Somehow, my ragged red ponytail and pale face don’t measure up.
“Thank god,” I say, twiddling the ends of my hair. “You’re the only one who can calm him down.”
There’s always a head housekeeper lurking in the kitchen, unofficially working as an expediter, there to keep Sam under control—though that job can be near to impossible sometimes. Tiff, however, is better at calming Sam than Alex. She stands and snacks and talks to Sam about his family, uses her voice to soothe him like a trainer would a horse.
“He’s been bad lately, huh?”
“I don’t know why I piss him off so bad,” I say, flicking at my nails. They’re peeling from the bleach. My knuckles are dry and cracking, my cuticles torn. Before this summer, I had beautiful long nails. I shove my hands under my thighs and sit on them, hoping Tiff doesn’t notice.
“Don’t worry. I’ve been working with him for years and he still screams at me,” she says, shrugging.
* * *
The problem is that Sam seems to like turmoil. He’s a religious watcher of soap operas. When his wife writes to him from their home in Florida, she keeps him up to date on his shows. There’s no TV signal here, so he’s bereft of drama, which we’re convinced is why he tries to start it within the housekeepers.
He likes to try to play us off against one another. If we come into the dishpit and the sink is already crowded with filthy pans and lids, he tells us that whoever worked the day before us left it for us, when in reality, it was him. He tells us that girl said that we were lazy, and that girl said that we didn’t leave enough cleaning rags for her—because in Sam’s world, we still don’t seem to warrant names.
Sometimes, it goes beyond stories. One day, he makes me a batch of peanut butter Rice Krispies squares and hands them to me in front of all the other girls while we’re watching a movie. “Don’t share them with anyone,” he says. When he walks back to the kitchen, I’m left holding the bag, flush-faced, six sets of eyes on me.
Another time, he asks me to scrub all of the lowest shelves with steel wool. My knees start to bleed as I crawl around the kitchen in order to get the job done, and the other housekeepers watch, aghast, but he doesn’t let them help.
So the housekeepers create a rule: no man left behind. No woman left alone in the kitchen at the end of the night. We make sure that we all leave together. It’s a hard rule to stick to when the serving and washing comes fast and thick and the sun sets so late. It’s a hard rule to remember when we know there’s a mickey of pilfered rum being passed around in the guideshack as we clean and mop. But it’s necessary to stay strong and true to one another. After we mop the last corner, after we dry the last knife, after we drop our aprons and trays, our power comes from leaving the kitchen as a coven, holding hands and escaping the steam, the sweat, the stink of charred meat. We debrief in groans and chuckles on the dark forest path back to our cabins, where we peel off our dirty clothes, comb out our long hair. Forget the day’s bullshit. Take pleasure in knowing that we’re there for one another.
* * *
“Two medium rare, one rare, one well done,” I rattle off to Sam, shoving my notepad back down into the waistband of my pants. The paper is already damp and limp from how hard I’m sweating, and I’m sure that I have pen smudged across my lower back. Steak night is always stressful. Most of the girls hate prime roast night because it’s tricky to time. Sam makes the roast early, and asking for rare or well-done slices means anxiety. Early in the evening, well done means dropping a piece of medium-rare beef into a pot of boiling water. Later in the evening, after the roast has sat, rare is an impossibility. Me, I hate steak night, when Sam stands over the grill, trying to time his cooking so that each steak is made to the guests’ specifications, but all the plates have to come out together. The fans over the stove struggle to keep the intake going, and the servers smell like burned beef when we leave the kitchen.
In a way, though, we work better together when the entire kitchen staff, including Sam, is equally stressed. When he’s overwhelmed, Sam has less energy to snap at us. When the servers are overwhelmed, we move around one another in well-oiled orbits, swooping full plates over each other’s heads and ducking under arms heavy with accoutrements. Prima ballerinas of the tiny northern kitchen. Divas of the delicate dance. We push up our sleeves to expose Rosie the Riveter biceps, sweat collecting along our wrists and brows and making our hair stick to our napes in exquisite finger curls. We slap one another’s bums to get past, shifting in and out of each other’s way without thinking twice. We’re comfortable with one another’s bodies without being overt about it. If I were an observer, I would think us beautiful.
Busting into the kitchen, I barrel through the dishpit, where Sydney is wallowing in
smoke. It coils around her head, falling across her shoulders like an extra head of hair. If it weren’t such an alarming scene, it would be arresting. She looks at me, eyes narrowed. Sam has been struggling with the fans, or maybe he got a glut of orders and has thrown too many steaks on the grill. Whatever the case, the kitchen is smoking at the seams.
Without stopping my trajectory, I wink at her, clicking the side of my mouth like a cowboy.
“Stop, drop, and roll, baby,” I holler. Her laughter nips at my heels as I leave the kitchen.
* * *
On one of my dishpit days, I drag myself into the kitchen. Homesickness hasn’t been an issue so far, but today I feel so low. I miss my family. I miss Toronto, a comfortable mattress, a semblance of privacy. I miss having a place to shave my legs, a room in which to tell secrets. Living with so many other young men and women can be emotionally rewarding, but it’s also exhausting. I’m privy to everyone’s business, and they are privy to mine.
Sam is clattering around the kitchen, mumbling to himself as though he’s been up for hours, despite it being 6:30 a.m. He doesn’t glance over when I slide in front of the sink and tie the apron around my waist with shaking hands. The exhaustion is so deep in my bones that I can’t even lift my head to look at him, to see if his body language hints at the kind of mood he’s in and, therefore, what kind of day it will be.
There’s a silence behind me as I start to wash the early-morning dishes—the grease-thick bacon trays, the gummy oatmeal pot. It’s all I can do not to cry. I can’t look forward at the expanse of the day without feeling upset.
“What’s the matter with you?” His voice surprises me. He’s right behind me; I didn’t hear him.
If I could only tell him. I’m sad. I’m weary. I haven’t had more than six hours of sleep a night since coming here. You make me anxious. I don’t want to be in the kitchen today. Instead, I mutter something about missing home, my family.
Sam pauses. His energy slows down. His arms stop moving. It’s rare to see him in a low phase, so I can’t help but look up from my washing and stare. It’s in this moment that he appears most relatable—no strange tics, no weird expressions. He’s not telling jokes, not flicking his fingers at me. He’s stationary, thinking. Quiet.
Then he turns and leaves. I’m left holding the oatmeal pot.
When he returns a few minutes later, he’s holding a letter and some pictures. He doesn’t hold them out to me at first. Instead, he leans back against the dish-drying table and looks at me, appraising. He’s a different person when he’s calm. He seems kindly.
“You miss them, huh?”
I nod.
“This is from my wife.” Sam tentatively extends his hand. “There’re photos of my grandson in there.” He looks at me, as if to see if I properly value the rareness of this interaction. “He likes to make funny faces, so she took some pictures and sent ’em. I don’t always like to look at them. Because they make me a little sad.”
I look at the pictures of his grandson. In one photo, his little cheeks are puffed. In another, his lower lip is stuck out. I knew that Sam had a family, someone who loved him enough to write him on the regular, but seeing photographic evidence hits the point home. I look at the pictures over and over again, worried that if I give them back, I’ll forget that he does have a heart, a life outside of this crummy kitchen.
I don’t look up for a little while. I would never admit to having tears in my eyes, but I feel too fragile to try to commute the tenuous lines of communication that Sam and I have just strung between us. I hear him shuffle away. I’m still holding the pictures and the letters; I try to sniff quietly, so he doesn’t hear me.
“Here.”
I look up. He’s back, holding a huge bag of cookie bars. Sam’s desserts are legendary: his brownies, blondies, cookie bars, cheesecakes, crisps, and the birthday cakes he grudgingly bakes for us. Even more treasured are those peanut butter Rice Krispies squares, and his vaunted peanut butter cheesecake. Everyone pleads for extra helpings of dessert, but it rarely happens.
“I know you like ’em,” he says, thrusting them at me. “So does that girl. The one who worked here yesterday.”
That girl, as he calls her, has been working here for about a month. I know he knows her name. I have to smile at the absurdity of it. Maybe he doesn’t want to learn our names because he knows we’ll be gone next year. Some of the employees come back season after season, but many go on to pursue careers, leaving the lodge behind. He’s probably seen hundreds of girls come and go. I don’t believe he misses any of them, but maybe it makes him feel old, stagnant. Ossified, stuck in his tiny slapdash kitchen, cooking on the same stovetops, making the same breakfasts.
I hold the bag of cookie bars close to my chest. Next week, Sam could make me wash all of the grill vents. I’ll have to change my dishwater three times to catch even a glimpse of the steel beneath the soot and grease. I’ll have to go into the pantry and cry just to make it through the day, and I’ll have to run back into the kitchen when I hear him howling for me through the thin walls. This moment won’t change anything. But for now, I won’t think about that. I only know that the cookie bars are still warm against my skin, and that I feel better.
TROUBLE BEAR
On a late June afternoon, one of those days when the air is so heavy that the camp falls quiet under its dozy blanket, Henry strides into the main building, where I’m working floater duties, and asks if I want to see a bear up close. The beauty and the downside of having a dump near the lodge is that it attracts a group of black bears that grow more accustomed to humans than is proper; dump bears don’t have to scavenge for food, because they have a rotting buffet at their disposal. Murphy, who’s a hunting guide when he’s not at Kesagami, warned me that it was going to be an active summer for bears, since he saw so many of them from the plane on the flight up. We’ve been dealing with the bears on and off in a peripheral way—the dockhands have gotten especially used to seeing curious eyes in the forest, and we’ve found a few garbage cans knocked over some mornings.
Some of the other workers have seen bears this summer, but I haven’t. I’m sure at any given time I’ve been within a dozen or so feet of one without noticing; being in the vicinity of a bear seems unavoidable. Putting yourself close to one on purpose is, to me, incredibly foolish. But anything is better than sitting alone at the bar, washing Thermoses. Henry has worked us so hard and this seems like a truce. His eyes are lit up in a boyish way, and I sense that there’s no ulterior motive. I want to see what my boss is like when he’s truly enjoying this place. And I want to go home having seen a bear.
I’ve never been to the dump. The housekeepers have motioned to it during our “cleaning the forest” chores, which is when Henry asks us to move branches he thinks are unsightly from the underbrush so the fishermen can’t see them when they walk the paths. That back there is the dump, don’t really need to go there, really only a place the boys go when they do the burn, lots of bears there. Those are the sentiments about the dump, which exists back in the spruce, back down along the path Henry stands on, grinning. It’s exceptionally unsettling to be staring down the throat of the forest, but I figure I’m safe with him, probably, and there’s no better time than the present to see the guts of the place. So far, I’ve managed to pretend that I’m not really as far north as I am. I’ve stuck to the paths that connect the cabins, the well-trod shoreline, the bunks and bathrooms. And now, I know, is the time for the baptism by fully immersing myself in the green that spreads, silent and waiting.
I follow Henry dutifully along the path, trying to keep my breathing even. With every step I take, I’m surprised at how far I feel from the lodge. The farther back we go, foot by foot, the quieter it gets, and the more the noise from the activity at Kesagami is intensely and rapidly muffled. Even though Henry is only a few feet ahead of me, it feels as if no one else exists; the spruce trees are so thick that I feel alone, as if I’ve gone back in history. And the forest is painfully gre
en: moss on the tree trunks, needles on the dry ground, the brush crackling underfoot. The smell of it surrounds me, forcing its way into me. This isn’t the forest in a fairytale where girls befriend the beasts they find. This is real.
Henry walks confidently in front; I follow a few paces behind, out of deference, and also defence—I figure that if a bear lunges, he’ll be between me and its claws and teeth. I’m a bit appalled at myself for imagining my boss as bear bait, but as we get further into the summer, my thinking has gotten starker and starker. He’s talking about the dinner service, the new guests flying into camp, the current state of the dump and how that bodes for forest-fire prevention. I tune him out, and focus on the one-two-one-two of our combined footsteps on the soft soil. I can see only his heels in my up-eye vision. And then—
“There he is,” Henry says, and I can hear his smile without seeing his face.
The bear is a big boy, well over two hundred pounds, with a white blaze across his broad chest. We’re about twenty feet away, so he hasn’t deemed us a threat. Or maybe we haven’t entered his scent stream. He’s nosing around in the garbage, whuffling from pile to pile, his big rump wobbling as he shifts back and forth. I can hear his exhalations, breathy wheezes and fluttering sighs, as if he’s demarcating his triumphs and frustrations. I’m surprised: he looks funny, even harmless. But that doesn’t stop my pulse from drumming against my throat and through the cage of my breastbone. I try to breathe quietly through my nose, and I keep my mouth closed for fear of gasping. Henry crouches, and I follow suit. We shuffle forward, my heart whumping in my chest. Can the bear hear us? Can he smell us?