by Julia Pandl
I could tell it was a monumental feat for him, just getting up the stairs; speaking was out of the question. We all knew what it took to get through a brunch shift under the best of circumstances, and mercy flowed freely among the staff on Sunday mornings. As lovely as the brunch smelled when you were well, a hangover (as I myself would learn later) could set your stomach spinning and your brain throbbing like the Zipper at the state fair, the difference being that ex-con carnies ran the rides at the fair and George ran the ride at the restaurant.
“Goddamn it, Jeremiah!” my father bellowed.
Jeremiah winced as if a knitting needle had been jammed into his ear. I giggled, sympathetically, but I giggled. There was something so awkwardly hilarious about hearing my father swear that way at my brother. Watching George come unglued on a Sunday morning was like sitting next to a silent church fart—it happened in an instant, took you by surprise, and was absurdly funny, but you knew you weren’t supposed to laugh. With the sometime exception of the word shit—because Terry liked it—profanity was strictly off-limits in our house, especially when it involved God damning a person, place, or thing. I squirmed under the knowledge that when Terry found out, my father would surely be in big trouble.
George dropped his knife and bounced toward us, his chef T-shirt snaps ready to let go and his rolled-up pants swinging loosely around his broomstick legs. He wiped his bloody hands on a bar towel and tossed it over his shoulder. His hair stretched high in every direction, like he had just escaped the asylum. “You’re late, mister.” Mister was Lady Jane’s male counterpart. Mister showed up when there was no gas left in George’s car. “And have you ever heard of a razor? You can march right back down those stairs, go home, and shave.” Then he looked at his watch and said, “You have ten minutes.”
Of course, Jeremiah marched right back down those stairs, went home, shaved, dragged himself back, changed into his chef clothes, and set about his weekly task of setting up the brunch.
It was a big job, setting up the brunch. A million little pieces had to be put in place before 10 a.m., and almost everything involved a trip down the stairs and into the back of the basement, approximately a half mile away from where we served. Jeremiah had to park the eighteen-wheeler and fill it with water; arrange the pancake griddle; set up the omelet station; and make sure there were spoons, forks, tongs, ladles, spatulas, portable ovens, fuel, buckets, sauté pans, plates, props, and towels. He had to make sure serving tables were skirted, electrical cords were covered by duct tape, and ice was crushed—and then there was the food. The eighteen-wheeler had to be filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, whitefish, veggies, and potatoes. He had to get the pancake batter, set up juices; put out the cold salads, the smoked fish, and the fruit; and place a hundred different omelet fixings just right so they could be reached with speed and accuracy.
And after everything was in its place, he had to put on his happy face and actually make omelets, each one perfect and fluffy, for a million hungry customers. While he did all this, I peeled shrimp and made pancakes. Of course, I wanted his job—not because I thought it was better or easier, but because it was his.
Even on a good day, when his brain was firing on all cylinders, Jeremiah occasionally became mesmerized by the minutiae of the job, wasting precious minutes searching for the perfect sauté pan, the one he had used the week before, the only one in a sea of sauté pans that let him flip an omelet effortlessly. Today it was a ladle. Somewhere, underneath ten thousand miscellaneous utensils, in the bottom of a clear plastic Lexan tub under the counter at the end of the dishwasher, there was a lone one-ounce ladle that measured the precise amount of vegetable oil needed to produce the perfect omelet.
“Goddamn it, Jeremiah, what are you doing? What are you doing?” George said, when he found Jeremiah on his knees shaking through a noisy, twisted mass of bigger ladles, tongs, scoops, and balloon whisks, paralyzed by the need to find that one thing and unable to force his foggy brain out of its trance.
“I’m looking for that one ladle.”
“There’s a hundred ladles right in front of your face. It’s nine thirty, there’s nothing set up out there, let’s go, let’s go!” He reached down and pulled up a giant soup ladle. “Look! Here! If it was a snake it would have bit you.”
For some reason, sometimes because it was Sunday and he was hungover, but mostly because he was sixteen, Jeremiah had absolutely no sense of urgency. No matter what, he remained unfazed. The brunch had a heartbeat that galloped from the moment my father crossed the threshold of the back door. The whole place throbbed along with the vein in his forehead. Even I could sense it. The key to keeping the pace and not getting trampled was simple: look painfully hassled.
This, thank God, came quickly and naturally to me. I peeled shrimp and cleaned strawberries with the intensity of a brain surgeon. I learned how to speak loudly using laconic phrases. It didn’t matter if the person I was speaking to was a mere three feet away. It didn’t matter if he or she understood a word I said. The only thing that mattered was that he or she realized how insanely difficult and important my trip to the bathroom was. And I learned how to deliver food to the eighteen-wheeler as if I were delivering an artificial heart.
Jeremiah, on the other hand, meandered around the building, distracted by everything in his path like a second grader walking home from school. And because George found a way to stumble upon every distraction, the nickname “Goddamn It Jeremiah” was born. Everyone used it: the cooks, the bartenders, the waitstaff, even me.
The Packers games were the biggest distraction of all. We all worshiped at the altar of the beloved and detested 1970s and ’80s Green Bay Packers football teams. Miraculously, Jeremiah and I managed to do this without fighting. Misery, even among a bitter sibling rivalry (and perhaps even more so) loved company. There’d been but two winning seasons in twenty years, my friends, yet we anxiously awaited each and every kickoff like kids awaited Christmas morning. But for us Santa never came; instead, we received the likes of Dan Devine, Forrest Gregg, and Lindy Infante. Each week, though, depending on the hang time of the kickoff, gave us a brief moment of hope.
At twelve thirty, the spirit of Curly Lambeau called and Jeremiah walked to the bar. There was nothing covert about his movements. He just checked his watch, set his spatula down, turned off his ovens, slipped right past George who was playing cat and mouse with a pile of sausages, and headed for the TV. I watched in awe and disbelief. There were no customers in line, but still, leaving his spot at the omelet station in the middle of brunch took some serious balls.
It took George about sixty seconds to notice. Brandishing his tongs, he turned and skipped around the wall toward the bar. I followed. The snap of his heels and the click of his tongs produced a lyrical echo across the ceiling of the rotunda as he advanced across the warped hardwood floor. Jeremiah sat on the edge of the banquette, facing the screen, with his ankles and arms crossed, just as if he were sitting on the floor of our living room. Even with George bearing down on him, he didn’t move an inch. I half expected my dad to pile drive him into the red vinyl.
Instead, he stopped short, sucked in a quick breath between his gritted teeth, and whispered with a twitch, “Goddamn it, Jeremiah.”
Then Dad paused, looked up, and asked, “What’s the score?”
7
Mother’s Day
I was still a beginner when I worked my first Mother’s Day brunch, too stupid to be afraid. My father and I drove in from the lake, the same as we had for almost a year, except we started out an hour early. He was unusually quiet and über-twitchy that morning. As we were leaving the house, Terry, wearing a relaxed smile and a seersucker bathrobe, sank into the corner of the couch with the Sunday crossword puzzle and a pen. She never looked up when she lit her cigarette and said, “Bye-bye.”
In the Pandl household, Mother’s Day wasn’t about our mother at all—it was about everybody else’s mother. It looks a little sad from where I sit now, but that’s just
the way it worked. We rarely celebrated the day, and we never went out. The mere suggestion of going to a restaurant on Mother’s Day, even if we didn’t have to work, was considered blasphemous. We knew better. We stayed home, or we worked, in the thick of things for sure, but always carefully existing on the fringe of Mother’s Day, sidestepping the bulge and crush of the raggedy-ass greeting-card masses.
So Terry’s reality, every Mother’s Day, was solitude. I couldn’t say with absolute certainty whether or not she liked it, but somehow I sensed she did. Hell, after thirty-odd years of listening to us needle each other to the edge of insanity; years of screaming, yelling, pinching, scratching, pulling hair, and slamming doors; of waiting for small change, nuts, bolts, Barbie shoes, and army men to show up in somebody’s poop, who wouldn’t embrace a little alone time?
George drove in silence with one hand on the wheel while he chewed the fingernails off the other and spit them on my side of the dashboard. It was like I wasn’t even there. Actually, it was like he wasn’t even there. We did not play the “what are you thinking?” game, nor did we play the “guess the time on the bank clock” game. Instead, he held the windshield in such an intense, trancelike stare, I found myself leaning over and looking for cracks, or bugs, or a spinning sun.
When we finally pulled into the parking lot, he let out a gigantic sigh of resignation and said, “Here we go,” as if we were lining up for a firing squad.
My first task of the day was to slice smoked turkey. The brunch had silver platters of smoked turkey, arranged in neat piles around the rim, with a dish of Durkee’s mustard in the center. Anything smoked, according to my undeveloped palate, was disgusting, but I knew better than to complain. Miss Willie handed me a gray bus tub loaded with medium-sized turkey breasts and, in what seemed like slow motion, pointed to the slicer.
As a rule, I was unafraid of inanimate objects, but I had seen enough horror movies to know that you had to watch yourself around garbage disposals, lawn mowers, and meat slicers. In my imagination, the meat slicer watched me, with eyes and teeth like Cujo’s. There were times when I’d step around it, pressing myself up against the wall in order to avoid falling prey to its razor-sharp circular blade. Worse, George knew the carnage it was capable of, yet he treated the thing as if it belonged in the Smithsonian. “You have to take it apart and clean it every time!” he’d yell. “Like this.” Then he would gently dismantle its pieces, polish them until he could see his reflection, put them together again, stand back, and admire its beauty. “Like that,” he’d say with a slightly demonic smile.
A few years earlier, I had seen the slicer try to eat my sister Peggy. That day, someone must have brought me along for the ride and then decided to put me to work. I stood a few feet away, peeling potatoes. Peggy was slicing green peppers in swift, rhythmic strokes. Just as I was admiring her command of the great stainless beast, I saw a fat bubble of blood squirt off the blade and splatter as it hit the wall.
“Shit,” she said quietly, pulling her hand away and wrapping it in her apron.
I ran over and said, “Lemme see.”
Blood poured down the back of her hand and clung to the soft hair on her arm as she peeled away the apron. She held up her index finger and gave it a tentative bend.
“What is that?” I asked, watching two folds of skin open up around her knuckle and reveal a thick slice of something grotesquely white.
She lifted her finger to get a better look. “I think it’s my bone.”
I bent over, put my left hand on my knee, and dry-heaved into my right. The black rubber floor mat spun like it was circling a drain. “You better show Dad.”
So she did. At the restaurant, however, his sympathy was infinitesimal. He just shook his head and said, “Sorry, but there’s no one to cover your shift. You’re gonna have to stay and get it stitched up after lunch.”
“Really? You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
“No, I’m not. Just wrap it up and put a couple gloves on.”
So she did.
I know for a fact that these days it’s against the law to let a thirteen-year-old operate a meat slicer. Perhaps it was the law even back then, but those rules never applied to us, so on my first Mother’s Day brunch I went ahead and got started on the turkey. I worked slowly, carefully drawing the carriage back with the handle of the pusher, sliding it forward and slipping even peels of turkey into the palm of my hand, never taking my eyes off the spinning blade.
Around me, though, the rest of the world had been set in fast-forward. It was not a normal Sunday. Oven doors slammed. Bacon sizzled. Eggs cracked. Serrated stainless-steel teeth chewed through pineapple, watermelon, and cantaloupe rinds. And all the while the air gathered in a nervous curl of energy, like the sky turning yellow, or like the ocean receding in advance of a tsunami.
The kitchen smelled the same, like every other Sunday morning, but I knew something was different when Miss Willie sidled up to me and whispered in my ear, “Girrrrl, your daddy wants you to run the brunch.” There was a scary little laugh buried deep in her chestnut eyes.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, you’ll see. You’ll see.”
“What?”
“Uh-uh . . . nooo,” she said. She shook her head, still giggling as she walked away.
Miss Willie had worked there since before I was born. She commanded a frightening reverence, and my father had made her word the law. The last thing you needed was Willie criticizing your work or your speed. God help me, I could never keep up with her. Hard-boiled eggs, shrimp, kiwi—when it came to peeling, she bested me at least two dozen to one. She peeled cantaloupe like an apple, with a ten-inch serrated knife curled in her fingers. It was downright heroic. She always looked a little war torn: crooked bandanna, burned apron, and frayed and dirty shirt, like she had just battled a bazooka loaded with pancake batter. Her arms were covered in a smattering of caramel-colored scars, some stringy and thin, some bulbous and thick, from years of brushing up against the doors of the convection oven.
Miss Willie ran the salad department. She had two favorites in my family, Chrissy and Amy, and every one of us knew it. She told them all her secrets, shared her baking tricks, including every single ingredient. With the rest of us, she’d wait until our backs were turned and then toss something into the mix, something that made her chocolate mousse pie and her schaum tortes stand in perfect peaks, while ours were limp and watery. I felt bad about it for a while, thinking she didn’t like me, but then I learned that she did this to the local newspaper too. From time to time her recipes were printed there, but she always left something out: a spin, a fold, a pinch. The next day dozens of frustrated customers called, wondering why their banana cream pie neither looked nor tasted like the one they had eaten at Pandl’s.
A few minutes later, Katie came around. “You better make sure everything’s full out there today,” she said, with unusual intensity. Her eyes were wide, her brows taut. “I’m not kidding. No screwing around today or Dad’ll drop his basket.”
“Okay.”
“Just make sure nothing gets less than half full. Okay?”
“Okay.” I rolled my eyes. As if I didn’t know. Jeez.
The restaurant doors opened at nine, an hour earlier than usual. Within minutes, the dining room was stuffed with mothers and their children. Bodies zipped in and around the tables, galloping toward the buffet, keeping a freakish high-frequency William Tell overture-like time. Had I been witnessing it from afar, or on TV, perhaps it would have seemed amazing, even amusing, but being there was actually quite frightening. I worried that I might get trampled and end up suffocating under a twisted pile of panty hose and pink sweaters sets from Chadwicks of Boston. My first instinct was to run for my life, but I knew that was out of the question at this point, so I ran around in circles ten thousand, maybe twenty thousand times, going from the dining room to the kitchen and back again. The kitchen was noisy with the percussion of banging plates, clanging glassware, sliding sheet p
ans, pouring juice, and scraping knives. Everyone knew what to do and nobody talked. The dining room was the exact opposite—everyone talked and no one knew what to do.
Serving was a two-man job, divided unevenly between George and Katie. They stood side by side. He served the whitefish and the vegetable—that day it was green beans—and Katie served everything else: scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, and American fried potatoes. The whitefish was delicate and therefore more time consuming.
“How about a beautiful tail?” I heard him ask somebody’s mom. “No bones in the tail.”
“Sure.”
My father slid the tail next to her scrambled eggs like it was a recently dusted artifact prepared for carbon dating.
“Isn’t that just gorgeous?” he said. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” Twitch. “Almost too pretty to eat.” Twitch. Laugh.
The mom gave him a tense smile and a nod and moved on. Customers gave him that look on Sundays all the time—bewildered, sympathetic, yet scared.
As I ran back to the kitchen to retrieve a fresh stack of hot plates, I was stopped by one of the waiters, Larry Miller. Larry was a younger guy, but he had worked there for quite a while, long enough to appreciate, and respect, the fact that George’s little idiosyncrasies grew exponentially along with the number of reservations in the book.
“Psst, Julie,” he whispered, and waved me over toward the coffeemakers. “Come here.”
I smiled and peeked under the mammoth urns. “You got some bacon hidden under there?”
“No.” He laughed.
A few weeks earlier, my father had come around the corner just in time to see Larry about to shove a couple of pieces of bacon in his mouth, so he had ditched them under the big urns, hoping George wouldn’t notice. But George did, of course, and coughed up a frenzied lecture on the evils of wastefulness, ending with, “WOULD YOU THROW BACON AROUND LIKE THAT IN YOUR HOUSE?”
“See that kid over there?” Larry pointed to a little busboy with curly blond hair, standing in front of the dish machine, dividing piles of flatware into bus bins. His black pants were sucked in tightly between his pudgy butt cheeks.