by Amy Brent
She felt her face go red. She was pretty when she blushed, everybody said that—she had large brown eyes and a small nose that could only be described as “cute”—but with Mark it was a liability, because he would take advantage of her. Her dark brown hair, which she’d straightened and pulled back into a bun, felt as if it was curling out of it its hold. “Is this part of the interview?” she asked. She stared at him from the opposite side of the desk, her legs crossed, wondering what her own price was. Fingers? Actual sex with him? She wasn’t wearing anything underneath, because she knew he’d make her show him before he’d even consider bringing her into the kitchen—the line had been crossed the moment she’d applied for the job at his restaurant-and-hotel. It was just a matter of limiting the damage.
“Just making conversation.”
"If you want to fuck me, just say so and get it over with," she said. He’d always had something for her body, petite but fierce, curvy but strong.
It was Bad Feminism 101, agreeing to sleep with a man in exchange for a job. And she knew that if the cooking staff ever found out about it she might be fired anyway, though the fact that she was still “just” a line cook would probably go a long way to mollify them. Other students could afford to travel to cities like New York to find jobs, but she was stuck in the suburban nightmare of small-town America, where there was only one restaurant big enough to need multiple chefs.
He came around the desk and planted his feet in front of her. She gulped, but she knew what he wanted her to do: she pulled her shoulders back, bringing her chest forward. He coughed. She began to unbutton her blouse. When that was finished she let him brush the silky fabric off her shoulders.
"No bra," he said, cupping her breast as if he were gauging an orange. "You know how to get me."
"What can I say?" she asked, gasping as he pushed his finger into her nipple. "I need the job."
"You liked it, don't lie to me."
"I need the job," she said, gritting her teeth. Both nipples, now--and it hurt, pure pain, no pleasure. He’d always had a thing for her breasts—they were on the large side, her nipples darker and contrasting more with her olive skin than most people expected.
"I'm hurt," he said, pouting. "After everything I did for you."
She kept her mouth shut, wondering if the job was really worth this. But his was literally the only place in town hiring at a wage that she and her mother could live on. "Suck my cock," he said. "On your knees," he added, pointing at the floor.
She felt her face burning, but she got on her hands and knees. He pulled her skirt up over her ass, and beckoned her to follow him over to the full-length window. It wasn't a high rise but it was four stories above the street, and it was the middle of the workday, and as she took him in his mouth she tried to tell herself that nobody would be looking, and if they did look her hair was down, at least--they wouldn't recognize her.
His cock was out already, meeting her when she pulled herself up. It was disappointingly normal—she couldn’t help but feel that a man with a personality as ugly as his ought to be a little deformed. He pulled her jaw open with his hands, and she felt the soft, fleshy tip tickle her gag reflex, and smelled the musky animal scent of him—and it took everything she had not to throw up right then and there—to stay there, her eyes watering at least as much from shame as from the difficulty she had in breathing.
"You're so pretty when you're crying," Mark said, as he wiped away her tears with his thumb. "There we go. Yes, just like that, with your tongue—go round, yes—God—yes—you have the job--"
***
As a child Nicole was convinced that her mother had some kind of ability to see into her mind and read her thoughts. The fact that she had always been a terrible liar had somehow never crossed her mind until she was seventeen. So when she came home that evening—having secured the job, at the very least—she still felt as if her mother somehow knew what she’d done, even though she knew it was inconceivable that her mother, housebound with the crippling pain of bone cancer, could have any idea about what she’d done to get the job.
She’d signed the contract with the Aviary and that was that. She started the next day. There was nothing more to be said, nothing more to be done. After she pulled her clothes back on they’d signed the papers, and he shook her hand and dismissed her as if she was just a delivery person. She cried all the way home to her mother’s house, and realized that the worst part had only just begun: there was no way she could tell her mother about this.
It was some kind of bone cancer, slow-growing but definitely metastatic. There was nothing the doctors could do except “keep her comfortable”, and even before Nicole opened the door she could smell the heavy, musky scent of the pot clinging to the air: Jordan, their weed dealer, was here. He was tall and lanky, with brown hair that stuck out at all angles, who dressed like a scarecrow, which made it hard for her to figure out how old he was. Her friend Leslie had been the one to put him in touch with them—pot was still illegal in their state, and in the three months that had elapsed since her mother’s diagnosis he’d proven himself to be friendly, kind, and trustworthy. He was sitting at the dining room table with her mother, a series of baggies laid out in on the table in front of them, with a stack of bills at one end of the line.
“Hey there,” he said, when she stepped through the door. “Is everything all right?”
“Great,” she said, forcing a smile. “I finally got that job.”
Her mother nodded sleepily. “That’s nice, dear.”
“I gave her a hit of Sandman’s Sleeper,” Jordan said. “On the house.”
“Thanks,” Nicole said. She nodded at the bills. “Is that enough?” The prices fluctuated every time he came by. She chose blissful ignorance when it came to how he set the prices; she never had the impression that he was screwing them, at least, which was more than she could say for Mark. She set her bag down and helped her mother over to the couch.
Jordan nodded. “I’ve got another batch of Pinky’s Pleasure curing now,” he said. “I should be able to deliver it in a week if you think it’d help.”
She shrugged. “That’s all the cash we have,” she said. “I won’t get paid until next week, and God knows if it’ll be enough.”
“Jesus,” Jordan said. “Is there anything I can do?”
She shook her head. “Not unless you can afford to give your product away for free,” she said, smiling wryly.
“Sorry,” Jordan said.
She shrugged and showed him to the door. He was a good guy, but it was basic economics: he needed to make money as much as she did. We all have to pay our own piper, she thought, as she watched him leave. The feeling of Mark’s hands on her body, the taste of him in her mouth, suppressed by Jordan’s presence, came back to her. The house was silent, and there was nothing between her soul and the memory of what had happened that afternoon, and after she closed and locked the door—after she made sure her mother was truly, deeply asleep—she slumped to the floor and let the hot waves of shame and pain wash over her. The tears came, slowly at first, but the repressive silence worked its way inside her head, like a knife, and she cried now—but silently.
The things we do for love. It’d always been a banal platitude. This was the first time that she’d truly realized what it meant.
One week later, Nicole came to the conclusion that it was either her or the job, but it couldn't be both. The job paid--that was all that could be said for it. Mark never set foot in the kitchen, but she could feel his influence with the guy who ran the kitchen, a guy (why did it always have to be a guy?) named Reginald Fiori, who refused to let her do anything more complicated than cutting vegetables--even when the kitchen was falling behind and needed another cook to help get the entrees out on time, even when she could time eggs and fry bread and toast garlic all at once, when the guy couldn’t multitask to save his life.
But she hadn't taken two years of classes and learned the difference between a mince and a mirepoix just to spen
d her life deseeding avocadoes and chopping onions into a coarse dice. She knew her shit, damn it. It was sexism, plain and simple, and even the other cooks in the kitchen knew it. But Reginald was Mark's friend, and he wasn't going anywhere, not even after the head chef, a beefy guy named Drew, with muscles the size of bowling balls and sleeve tats, spoke to Mark about making her the sous. "I tried," Drew said, and coughed up a loogey--he was a chain-smoker of at least thirty years, and while he claimed to be using a patch these days, he still lit up on every break, and it was beginning to show. "Mark's the only pony in this one-horse town, though, so if he wants to dish it, we have to eat it."
By the end of the second week Nicole was going crazy; one of the line cooks, a guy with a shaved head and more pictures on him than a children’s book, had a coke dealer and even she ended up taking a hit or two so that she could finish her shift without collapsing--coffee didn't begin to cut through this kind of exhaustion. She'd known that line cooks were underappreciated and overworked--and Reginald ran his kitchen worse than most so that the overwork was doubled and the underappreciation was tripled. But she couldn't have anticipated that it would be this bad. And so, on her one day off she called her friend Leslie Wiles and begged her to make a moment and rescue her from the insanity of her workweek. "If I don't have someone to stop me from finishing a bottle of tequila right now I'm going to drink myself to death before the day is over," Nicole said.
Leslie, being the best friend in the world, merely asked her to wait until she could get there before she started.
Leslie owned her own tattoo studio. She worked under the name Clash and while most of her work was simple, cliched motifs that pandered to the sensibilities of most of her clients, she specialized in creating portraits and three-dimensional work so realistic that people sometimes threw up looking at it. They'd met by accident: a few years ago Nicole had come into her studio one drunken night, together with a kid named Brian. She couldn't remember why she and Brian had gotten drunk, much less why they thought that getting tattoos was a good idea, but they'd ended up together--Leslie was just closing up and while she didn't tattoo them she did bring out a bottle of vodka and that was that. Nicole still heard from Brian from time to time--he was doing work for NASA these days--but she and Leslie still got together almost every week to bitch about work and clients. Or in Nicole's case, school and the job she'd worked to offset the costs.
"So, is it incompetence, assholery, or both?" Leslie asked as she pulled out a pair of tequila glasses. They were sitting at her mother's kitchen table, with the dainty floral wallpaper, lace curtains, and quaintly-worn country-style furniture that her mother favored. Nicole at least looked relatively normal in her jeans and t-shirt. Leslie, wearing black leather and kohl, her hair spiked and dyed blue, might as well have been an alien.
"Both," Nicole said. "I don't know if I can stand a third week."
"That bad?"
"The owner is Mark."
"Sheee-it."
There wasn't much more that needed to be said after that. Leslie had been the one privy to the nightmare that was the one-and-a-half dates with Mark. They tossed back their respective glasses of tequila in silence, slamming the glasses to the table with a firm “bang”.
“Maybe you could do private work,” said Leslie, after a moment.
“What?”
“Well, you know—go to a bunch of rich people’s houses and make a bunch of food for them.”
Is the tequila that strong? Nicole didn’t feel that drunk. “That’s a thing?”
Leslie shrugged. “Rich people outsource everything, dontcha know? Anyway, it probably beats making second-rate guacamole for eight hours a day.”
“It is so second-rate,” Nicole grumbled. That was the thing with the Aviary: for all that it pretended to be fancy, serving pommes frites instead of French fries, it was neither very good, nor very original, but in their town it was what counted as high-class dining, and most people didn’t know enough to know that they should be demanding better.
“I’m sure there’s some website out there,” Leslie said, grinning. “Come on.” She pulled Nicole over to the little side table that Nicole used as her desk—these days an elaborate desk wasn’t needed, with everything stored in the cloud and what-not. Leslie turned on Nicole’s laptop and opened up the browser, and typed in “Private chef services” to the search bar.
What came up was a bunch of erotic services. “Oh fuck no,” Nicole said. For a moment the memories of what Mark had made her do to earn the privilege of working like a dog in his kitchen threatened to overwhelm her. “I ain’t doing that shit.”
“Let’s refine the search,” said Nicole cheerfully, adding “cooking” to the list of search terms. “There we go. See?”
It was a website called “Tastemakers”, and it looked promising: no mention of erotic services, just a simple, straight-up cooking service you could sign up for. “Look,” said Leslie. “They do background checks of their clients and their chefs. Less chance of skeevy business. Do you have a nice picture?”
“Hey, I never said I’d do this,” Nicole protested.
“You’re fucking doing this,” Leslie said. “Because I’m not going to come by every week just to get drunk with you. I have other friends who need my alcoholic services, too, you know, and only one liver between you all. Now, what kind of food do you like to cook?”
***
Three days passed before Nicole got the chance to open her email. Her mother had some kind of crisis that landed her in the county hospital for a day, so between shifts there was a lot of driving and very little sleeping. By the time Nicole was able to bring her mother home again she could swear that her mother had lost another ten pounds somehow. “Don’t worry,” her mother said, “I’m fine.”
It was a lie, of course. Nicole could see her body falling apart in front of her eyes—in the blood that ended up in the toilet instead of urine, in the increasing number of foods that she could no longer handle. But all Nicole could say was, “Of course you are,” and keep tending to her as best she could. She was aware that it was a kind of denial—but telling her mother “At least” was still easier than saying “You can’t”. Nicole found herself seriously contemplating a trial with methamphetamines—Gerson, the kitchen’s coke connection, probably knew someone who dealt meth, too. It wouldn’t be too hard to get some and stay awake for days.
Early one morning, after she finished filing the insurance claims, her email alerted to twenty-six new messages, most of them from Tastemakers. A shot of excitement went through her—this could be her ticket out of this exhausting, grinding life. She opened the first one: an email from a mother who wanted someone to prepare “healthy, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, kid-friendly foods for my family of five, and one child won’t eat anything squishy, so no tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs (unless they’re hard-boiled)…”
Nicole deleted it.
There were emails that she was certain were trolls, because there was no way a human could exist on the restrictions that they had: people who wanted grain-free, fat-free, vegan diets (she was tempted to write back, “lettuce”) and people on all-liquid diets who needed organic juices enhanced with things like spirulina, which she actually had to look up. Delete, delete, delete.
And then there were the assortment of emails from men who clearly had every interest in sex and none at all in food. Just how many ways are there to say, “I want to eat your pussy?” She had some seven messages like this—she flagged them all. There was one email that gave her pause for a moment—the guy was clearly treating Tastemakers like a dating website, saying, “I’m a sensitive, caring man who’d love nothing more than to spend a little time with you in the kitchen,” going on to add how he was looking for a long-term thing and how he thought their tastes meshed with each other. He was probably right—but a new relationship didn’t pay the bills, and that was what she signed up for.
Delete, delete, delete.
At long last there was a message from
a man by the name of GoodFood who wrote that he liked fine food and good wine, would she like to come over and cook for him? And the money he promised her was nearly double what she’d asked for—which was already double what she was getting paid from Mark. His profile picture was that of a man standing in a doorway, back-lit so that he was silhouette, but there was no question that his suit was impeccably tailored.
“I can be there in two days,” she wrote back. That was her day off. At least she’d be doing work that she liked.
A message was returned almost instantaneously: “Good. Let me know what you need to make a three-course dinner, butter chicken and lemon rice, ratatouille, onion-and-anchovy pie, and General Tso chicken (for storing to eat later), and three healthy and portable lunches.”
Jesus, she thought. This guy is not kidding.
“Give me about a hour,” she wrote back.
Thank God for the Internet, she thought as she fervently looked up recipes for everything. She knew, generally, how to make everything—it was a question of spice and proportion and flavor profiles that varied. And as for healthy, portable, and flavorful lunches, well, that was what Pinterest was for. She found some delicious Middle-Eastern foods that would taste good and keep for a few days. Based on the foods he was requesting he had a diverse and varied palate—he would appreciate something bright and bold, tangy and crispy. Creating the perfect recipe was as much about complementing textures as it was about melding flavors, something most cooks couldn’t appreciate, and as her imagination ran riot she found herself wanting to make more, do more.
Stick with the job at hand, she reminded herself. If he wanted someone to tell him what he wanted he’d be paying for a dominatrix, not a cook.