The Resurrection of Tess Blessing

by Lesley Kagen

  He leans away from her hand. “Do we have any chips and dip?”

  She’d normally take the brush-off in her stride, but it’s been a bad day and his rejection lands hard on top of the messy stack already piled up in her heart. She’s this close to yelling at him, You better let me run my fingers through your hair before they’re buried along with the rest of me!

  Her mother goads her on. Smack him one. Let the ungrateful little snot know who’s boss.

  Tess has never and would never hit her children. Better to take her frustration out on Will. She calls out to him, “We’re in the den,” when she hears the bells jingle again.

  “Hey, guys!” Her husband sets an order of fries down next to their little card sharp and waves a glassy-looking diner bag her way. “Grilled cheese and tomato?” When she shakes her head, Henry snatches the bag out of his dad’s hand and returns to his royal flush.

  They can’t talk about the cancer in front of him, so Tess heads back upstairs, collapses onto her side of the bed, and waits for Will, who turns up a few minutes later to sit beside her. He massages his temples.

  See what a headache you are? Louise gloats.

  “Are you sure it’s ah…?” Will asks again.

  “I have an appointment with Rob Whaley on Thursday to discuss the surgery.”

  “Great! Rob’s a good guy. Wonderful family. Steady customer.” When Tess doesn’t respond, he asks, the way you do when you offer to help someone and hope like heck that they don’t take you up on the offer, “So, ah, do you need me to drive you to his office?”

  The appointment is right before the diner staff switches from breakfast to lunch, always a hectic time. “It’s scheduled right around the turn,” Tess says.

  “No problem. I’m sure Connie would be happy to fill in.”

  Oh, I just bet she would, Louise says with a raunchy laugh.

  “You’re supposed to work lunch on Friday. Do you think you’ll be up to it?” Will asks. “I could ask Sandy to cover for you.”

  “Don’t,” Tess bosses the boss. “Friday is Richie day.”

  Will smiles, places his hand atop of hers, pats it, and says, “Egbok. You’ll see.”

  He’d offered her food…a ride…a corny platitude. He’s exhausted his repertoire.

  When he stands and jiggles the ring of keys he keeps in his pocket, Tess is struck by how defined his biceps have become. And what happened to his pudgy belly? Maybe that’s what he’s been doing on Wednesday nights! He’s not bedding Connie, he’s pumping iron at Russell’s Gym! One of the women trainers must have long blond hair and wears Tabu!

  Your fancy head shrinker ever mention a little concept called denial?

  “Wish I could stay longer, but I’ve got a meeting with a new supplier in ten minutes back at the diner. Gonna be up when I get home tonight?” Will asks as he steps toward the bedroom door.

  She takes a chance, and replies flirtatiously, “That depends.”

  “Well, don’t force yourself to stay awake for me. You need your rest!” he says as he hustles out of the room.

  Tess is picturing him now lying at the bottom of the staircase where he landed splay-legged after missing the top step in his dash to get away from her.

  (Sad and mad can be as hard to separate as Siamese twins, can’t they.)

  She has just about had her fill of the male gender for one day, so she reaches for the phone to call Haddie for the third time today. Maybe her daughter wasn’t ignoring her calls, she could be studying in the library, or out on a date. There was a boy in the picture now. An artist psychically named Drew.

  When her call is routed to voice mail, Tess becomes so desperate to speak to a woman she loves that she lies back, closes her eyes, and makes one of her pretend calls. Post-traumatic stress disorder is horrible, but it isn’t all bad. Thanks to her hyperactive imagination she can virtually hear her sister speaking back to her in her baby-talking way.

  Birdie: Hello?

  Tess: (Bursting into tears) I’ve got cancer and I need your help with Haddie and…and Will doesn’t love me anymore and Henry is being such a little jerk and…Louise is saying hateful things in my head and I’m gonna die and I don’t believe in God so I’m gonna go to Hell.

  Birdie: (Bubbly) Guess who just visited Birdie?

  You Catch My Drift?

  Waiting tables at Count Your Blessings is the perfect job for my Tess. She gets a kick out of the staff, fills her customers’ hungry bellies, amuses all with her scintillating brand of humor, and when the shift ends, everyone returns to their respective lives, no one the wiser.

  For patrons around her age, the diner is a tonic for the ills of modern life. The younger set appreciates the place the same way they do the history museum. The jukebox holds forty-fives like Chubby Checker’s The Twist and the Everly Brothers Wake Up Little Susie. Above the soda fountain and running the length of the walls are eight-by-ten glossy pictures of ’50s movies like The Blob and From Here to Eternity that Will was given by his friend, Stan Majerus, who owns the Rivoli Movie House next door.

  No matter how much Tess wishes it weren’t true, she knows that their customers would be yanked straight out of those happy days if they knew that a malignant growth was flourishing inside the middle-aged, ponytailed waitress dressed in the old-fashioned white uniform with the wide black belt. She certainly is when she waits on cancer-patient Marilyn “Mare” Hanson, who used to run a little plump, but now reminds Tess of the No. 2 pencil she’ll use to jot down her order. Mare also used to be quite obnoxious, but the illness knocked the snot right outta her.

  (The folks that are attracted to Tess that I mentioned earlier on? I forgot to point out that a lot of them are also physically ill. She lures them like Lourdes.)

  On this particular afternoon Mare, a regular, is seated at table four. She’s staring out the front window of the diner with a wistful smile watching the Winter Festival visitors bustle by. The event is one of Ruby Falls’ most appealing. (Doesn’t take much to entertain folks who’ve been cooped up and staring at four walls most of the winter.) The snowman-building contest, bed races held on the river, and ice sculptures that line the sidewalks in front of shops offering sales are a big draw, and since Count Your Blessings is iconic, it’d been slammed as well.

  Mare’s chapped hands are cupped and lying on the red Formica table like she’s waiting for something to be dropped into them. Hope, Tess thinks. When she delivered Will’s shirts to Melton’s Dry Cleaners on Tuesday, Jan told her that employee, Mare, didn’t seem to be bouncing back the way she did the other times she went through chemo. “She’s got three kids,” Jan choked out before she slipped through the curtain into the backroom.

  Tess approaches the table and says, “Hey, Mare, what can I get you today?” She is aware that it’s a ridiculous question to ask in a myriad of ways. She’ll order the same thing she always does, but so much of her life now is in the hands of others that my friend feels compelled to allow her choices.

  “The usual?” Mare asks. “When you get the chance? No hurry.”

  Tess says, “Comin’ right up,” plucks a straw out of her apron, and sets it down next to one of her customer’s beseeching hands.

  On her way into the kitchen to prepare the double-thick chocolate malt that will hopefully add more meat to Mare’s bones, Tess slips on a spill and grabs onto the hairless arm of Otto von Schmidt to save herself from a nasty fall.

  The dishwasher’s reaction to her grab is to yell, “Whoa, Nelly!” way, way too loudly because he’s wearing sound-reducing headphones. Otto, who uses Nair on his hands and arms because he thinks it makes them faster in water, is wiry and of medium height. Seems silly to describe his hair as dishwater blond, but it is, and it stands on end like he was struck by lightning on the way to work, so he always comes off quite energetic. He fixes his one hazel eye on Tess—his other is made of glass, the result of a pencil incident that occurred when he was a child that no one has ever gotten to the bottom of—and says, “Steady th
ere, Bess.”

  She gave up correcting him years ago.

  Despite it being the toughest position in the diner to keep filled, Will might have fired him by now if Tess hadn’t pled his case. Her husband likes things to run smoothly and Otto von Schmidt is a mile of bad road, emotionally speaking. When he isn’t wearing his usual heavy duty headgear, a shower cap covered in aluminum foil is set atop his head in order to block satellite communications from the CIA and the dreaded Planet Argon. And if you should strike up a conversation with him be prepared to set aside some time. Otto will go on and on, repeating every once in a while, “You catch my drift?”

  Tess’s heart goes out to the fragile and paranoid dishwasher because he reminds her at times of Birdie, but even she had to admit that he’d gone too far when he began “investigating” one of the young women who worked in the vintage clothing store across the street from the diner. Otto bought high-powered binoculars and kept track of the girl’s every move in a black composition notebook. When just watching her wasn’t enough, he purchased a device called The Ear so he could listen in on her private conversations. He also wrote a stack of letters that he hand delivered to the owner of What’s Old Is New Again that went something like this:

  Deer Missus of Old Close Store. sailsgirl

  Debbie is hot to trot. give me her number pronto!!!!!!!!!!

  xxx OOOtto xoxo

  The mash notes stopped shortly after the owner of the store complained to Will, who had a serious discussion with his employee about appropriate behavior. Since Otto always took “The Big Boss Man’s” words to heart, he forgot about the local girl and went international. He ordered himself a Russian mail-order bride. He keeps a picture of the beautiful Elena above his workspace. The edges of the photo are curling from the steam, and it’s been kissed so many times that it’s become worn in the mouth area. His wife from Minsk doesn’t speak or understand much English, so when Otto says, “Did you hear that? That growling?” she nods and asks, “You vant I blow on your job?” and seems as happy with her big strong American as he is with her.

  Tess tells Otto, “Thanks for the hand,” wipes off the bottom of her shoe with a bar towel, and fetches the milk for Mare’s malted out of the drinks cooler.

  Connie Bushman leans into the kitchen to let Tess know, “Go ahead and double that malted order. Holly and Richie just rolled in…I mean….”

  Throughout the shift, my friend has been studying the hostess. Did Connie check to see if Will was watching when she bent over to give crayons and a coloring page to the little girl at the soda fountain? Was she showing him her cushy bottom or what a great mom she’ll be once Tess steps out of the family picture? She picked a thread off of Will’s shirt—a meaningless gesture of coworkers or the casual touch of intimates?

  I pick door number two, her mother says.

  Tess shouts back to the hostess, “Got it. Muchas gracias.”

  Juan Castillo, who is hunkered over the deep fryer, had been teaching her some kitchen Spanish, so he turns toward her with a smile.

  Tess thinks it’s funny that the head cook at a ’50s diner in a small Wisconsin town that serves the most American of American food is a man from down Mexico way. She’s muy fond of Juan. He can sling hash with the best of them, and even better, he cracks her up. Unlike the two revolving cousins that he brings in as line cooks, Juan’s English is pretty good, but not perfect. The one and only time he was late for his shift, he rushed into the diner apologizing for having a flat on the highway. “And when I open trunk of car there es no asparagus tire!”

  There’s a team of four servers this afternoon. Tess, two other women—Jeannie and Val—and a guy by the name of Cal Fullerton. Cal is in his early thirties, but flirts with every woman no matter her age. What a favorite he is amongst the mature ladies. Courtesy of the GI bill, he’s attending film school at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the same school that the Professor teaches at, and Tessie had attended in her younger years. Cal wants to direct motion pictures someday.

  He reaches for a glass on the shelf above Tess’s head and says, “Hey, did you and Henry have a chance to catch Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear yet?”

  “Yup.” Cal and her son are friends. Their shared passion for films bridged the age gap. The two of them love quoting dialogue to one another, each trying to top the other.

  “Wasn’t it incredible?” he says as he scoops ice out of the machine. “The camera angles were so inventive.”

  “Yeah, and the lighting was really something too,” movie-buff Tess replies. She would usually expound because she enjoys this kind of discussion, but she’s got an order to get out to Mare, and another to her favorite customer, Richie. God only knows how much time he has left she thinks as she pours the creamy goodness out of the stainless steel malt cups into three mugs and scoots out of the kitchen.

  She drops one of the malts on her tray to Mare Hanson, who is too appreciative, and then turns toward the table that she sets a RESERVED sign on every Friday because it’s closest to the door and can accommodate his elaborate wheelchair that his children have decorated like a Rose Bowl float.

  Richie Mattigan has Lou Gehrig’s disease. A powerful man nine months ago, the father of two was a lawyer for the downtrodden, active in the town, and taught Sunday School classes at St. Lucy’s, but these days, saliva slips down his chin and his speech is so foreign-sounding that his wife, Holly, must act as both his nursemaid and interpreter. Before the ALS hit, Richie could knock back a Blessing burger in two bites, but he lost the ability to chew and swallow solids within the last month.

  Whenever Tess sets his chocolate malt down in front of him on Fridays, she always makes sure to have a bit of comedy ready, the same way she did before he got sick. He has a great sense of humor and one of those soulful belly laughs that the disease has yet to claim. She keeps the jokes simple these days.

  “Hey, Richie, did you hear about the new organization Mothers Against Dyslexia?”

  He shakes his head. Can’t help it.

  “It’s called DAM.”

  The punch line takes more than a few beats to work its way to his diminishing brain, but when it arrives, he brays so forcefully that some of the malt comes shooting out of his nose. His wife reaches over and mops him up, which she’ll do for the duration of their visit. Holly never orders food when she’s in with her ailing husband because, as she told Tess one day behind her hand, “Eating in front of him seems like rubbing it in.”

  As much as Tess adores the Mattigan family, the hopelessness and unfairness of Richie’s condition always takes a toll on her, so after a few more convivial words she tells them, “Be back to check on you in a little bit,” and hurries off to make a pit stop.

  The “Dolls” restroom had won an award from the Mayor’s Beautification Committee thanks to arty Tess. She had papered the walls in Look magazine covers and other ’50s paraphernalia she and Will had found at swap meets when they were still doing fun things together. The porcelain racks hold embroidered hand towels and a fifties’ bureau is topped with colored perfume bottles with old-fashioned atomizers. She reaches for the blue Evening in Paris bottle and sprays a little behind her ears even though it was her mother’s favorite before she switched to Chanel No. 5. Tess was, still is, and will be until the day she dies, a hopeless romantic. She’d dreamt of spending her honeymoon in the City of Lights, but her agoraphobia and inability to fly had made that an impossible.

  Will was the one who came up with the idea of celebrating their vows in a more attainable Paris. They drove the red Triumph to Paris, Illinois where he’d booked the wedding suite at the Holiday Inn on the River. He ordered room service—the deluxe chicken dinner—and the lovebirds pretended they were dining on escargot and the packaged dinner rolls were croissants fresh from the oven. The murky water outside their motel window was the Seine. They danced the tango she’d taught him at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio on its banks. When they returned to the room, the newlyweds fed each other slices of che
rry pie à la mode with their fingers and they rechristened Will’s penis, the way young lovers are apt to. Mr. Business would henceforth be known as Monsieur Pierre.

  Tess splashes cool water on her face, runs a comb through her shaggy bangs, retightens her ponytail, and returns to the kitchen to find curvy Connie leaning against one of the prep tables taking a breather from the lunch rush. She’s helped herself to a glass of the pause that semi-refreshes.

  “How are you?” the hostess with the mostest asks sweetly as she slips a straw into the Diet Coke.

  Tess wonders, Does she sound solicitous? Did Will tell her that she had cancer? Is she feeling sorry for her? She gives Connie one of her stock answers, “Hangin’ in there. You?”

  The buxom blond closes her baby blues and sighs like she’s on cloud nine. “Couldn’t be better.”

  Tess knows there’s only one feeling that could elicit that sort of response. Connie is in love. She is dying to know with who, but there’s that famous saying, “Don’t ask a question if you don’t want to know the answer.” It’d be awful if she’s tired of hiding the affair with Will and comes clean right here, right now. On the other hand, she could say that she’s seeing Neil the cop again.

  Tess grips the edge of the silver prep table and says, “Do tell.”

  Connie replies with a minx grin, “Oh, I wish I could, but….” She even shrugs cute. “Don’t want to jinx it.” She wraps her luscious lips around the straw. “You have another table, by the way. Hoover and her book club are at the six top.”