“Then fold this hand. He doesn’t want to play, and the cost of you playing is too high.”
“Don’t know if I can,” he murmured.
“This is the voice of experience talking. I’ve played this game with my own father and you can’t win. You’ll get a shitty hand every time. Trust me.”
As with most of my advice, I’d be a much happier woman if I ever followed it. My dad walked out the door when I was three and for many years I played this emotional poker, losing every time. One thing my father did, however, ultimately saved me from the bitterness Marc was holding on to for such dear life. One memory that was sort of his salvation.
There’s an old-fashioned restaurant out on Hegenberger Road near the Oakland Airport called Gino’s. It’s had the same menu for thirty years. One Sunday before my father remarried, we were playing family, even though my parents had been officially divorced for years. My mother was in the front seat, sister and I in the back. I guess I was about eight, my sister six. We drove past Gino’s. God knows why we were even out driving that day; it was pissing outside like you can’t believe. The wipers were going full bore and all the windows were fogged up from the heat of our breath. Suddenly, my father swerves over the highway median and does a U-turn like Steve McQueen in the chase scene from Bullitt.
Dad begins yelling about freeing the donkeys from the rain. The poor beasts were getting drenched, he shouts. None of it made any sense. With a squeal of breaks he pulls up in front of Gino’s, jumps out of the car, not even bothering to slam the door. Rain’s pouring in from the open door. My mother rolls down her window trying to figure out what in hell was going on. Using our sleeves to wipe the windows clear, my sister and I see my father wading through the ice plant. He stops, waits a few seconds, and then with his head down, returns to the car. He gets in, nobody says a word and we drive off.
They weren’t real donkeys, of course, just Gino’s idea of landscaping. Stone donkeys chained in ice plant. They’re still there. Now they are painted red, white and green, the colors of the Italian flag. I saw them a couple of months ago. But when I was a child they weren’t painted, and on a rainy winter’s day, to a man with rather bad eyesight, they looked like real donkeys.
I dust this story off and replay it in my memory banks whenever I don’t get a birthday card or think about playing the kind of hate poker Marc had been dealing himself. Not a bad man, perhaps a terrible father.
After a few minutes, Marc and I lay back down on the makeshift bed of laundry and nestled each other spoon fashion to grab a couple of hours of sleep before school began. But neither of us slept. Occasionally one of us would move an arm to check the luminous dials on our watches and then sigh. I don’t know what kept Marc awake, but whenever I closed my eyes all I saw was an eight-year old girl with brown eyes and braids, nose pressed against the rain-splattered window, watching her father trying to free stone donkeys from the iceplant.
Chapter Nineteen
At 6:00 a.m. the alarms on our watches went off simultaneously. If I ever spend another night on the floor of a VW van, I’ll be crippled for life. I couldn’t help but moan as I tried to raise myself up on my elbows. Every muscle hurt. And not in the ways that I liked.
“Here.” Marc cupped my elbow and helped me into a sitting position. “You look pretty tired. You okay?”
I figured “pretty tired” was code for “total shit,” but I managed a small smile. After being up all night, Marc merely looked sleepy, eyes tight around the edges. I probably looked like an extra from Night of the Living Dead.
“Let’s get out of here. It’s going to be a long day,” I sighed. A double shift on maybe fifteen minutes of sleep. It would be eleven tonight before I’d have a chance to even think about my head touching a pillow. I sniffed, the smell of sex and Tide still lingered in the air. Pointed my nose toward Marc and sniffed again. Sex, no Tide. “We need to hit the showers before anyone else comes in.” I forced one knee to follow the other across the floor of the van, realizing that the only way to get through this day was a minute at a time.
Marc hung back as if not sure how to play this. Post-coital remorse? Most likely, post-coital confusion. Like he was supposed to say something about how great it was, or how pretty I was, and then segue into vague, clumsy hints about how this will never happen again.
I didn’t need to hear it, didn’t need to be given the soft landing, but I guess Marc was young enough that he hadn’t lost all of his innocence. He was probably a little puzzled to wake up, the heavy aroma of mutual passion clinging to his body, but in the cold morning light, no romance to disguise what was basically a screw. His brow creased in confusion. Perhaps he still believed that you had to be a little in love with someone to bed them. And who’s to say he wasn’t right? Maybe we had been a little in love. The memory of the raspberries, the dancing, the music. Was I going to begrudge myself six hours of love?
So although I really didn’t feel like picking up the slack here—I desperately needed to get out of the van and get to a shower—I decided to acknowledge that innocence, pay tribute to it. I turned around and ran a gentle hand along the stubble of his chin.
“Hey, it was good. I felt desired.” This was said with a slight catch in my voice because it was true. It had been so very long since I’d desired and been desired. “I can’t tell you what this meant to me.” I ran my thumb along the plane of his jaw. Such a nice jaw. “Thank you. But you have someone you love.” For emphasis I kissed him lightly, pulled on his bottom lip just a tad, and then let go. “Now make nice with Shelley and dig out that passport.”
I got back a grin of relief. We could dine at the chef’s table together, meet in the hallways, no sweat.
Poking a head around the door of the van, I checked out the parking lot before I climbed out. Coast clear. The last thing I needed was for a student to see Marc and me exiting the van, hair wild, clothes wrinkled, looking like we’d just auditioned for a porno flick. Marc followed me, his eyes shifting left to right with his own sneaky little glances. I wasn’t the only one concerned about the stupidity of making our little tryst public knowledge. All of a sudden remembering that there were cameras in the elevators, I spit in my hands and smoothed my hair back. It’s times like these when I realize I will never grow my hair back again.
Our clogs clip-clopped across the concrete in a slow, tired gait.
Hellish. The day was going to be nothing short of hellish.
Reaching the elevators, I barely had the energy to push the Up button. As the doors began to close, someone shouted, “Hold the door.” Oh. My. God. No. I lunged for the Close button, but O’Connor just managed to squeeze-in before they wheezed shut.
I said nothing, staring ahead, refusing to make eye contact. Marc greeted O’Connor with a lazy, “Hey.”
That “hey” went nowhere; the word hung in an embarrassed limbo. Silence from O’Connor. As the elevator rose, I tried to inch my way toward Marc so O’Connor wouldn’t smell sex in my hair. Pointless really, the entire elevator car reeked of old sweat and sex. He knew, oh, he knew. If his disapproval had been any stronger, I would have had to hack it back with a machete.
One half of me wanted to grab his shoulders, face him, demanding that he voice this disgust so that I could fling that disgust right back at him. How dare he? The other half of me shrank from confronting him, afraid I was forever diminished in his eyes.
When the elevator door opened, I fled to the security of the women’s locker room. Once inside, I moved on auto-pilot to the far corner of the room. Shit! Humiliation so ripe that my cheeks felt like they were on fire, I first leaned one red cheek, then the other against the cool steel of a locker door. Why did I feel like some fifteen-year old whose father has caught her with her boyfriend’s hand down her pants?
The door to the locker room slammed back against the wall.
“Mary!” O’Connor’s voice demanded.
I didn’t reply, shrank into the corner. Maybe he’d go a
way.
“I saw you come in here. Where are you?”
I waited two beats. Please go away, I prayed.
“Goddamn it, Mary,” he growled.
Finally, the feisty, I-don’t-have-to-take-this-shit-from-you genes kicked in. You know the Irish really have an unfair advantage. Except when it’s Irish facing down Irish.
“I have nothing to say to you, O’Connor. Nothing.” My voice echoed throughout the room, bouncing off the metal lockers. I sounded defiant. Excellent. The fact that I was propped up against the locker to brace my weak knees was immaterial.
In the five seconds it took for him to find me, I’d bucked up and thrown my shoulders back. I had done nothing wrong. He wasn’t going to shame me. I had no intention of acting the penitent.
Take the high road, Mary. Ask him to leave. Nicely, if possible and then try to manufacture out of thin air the energy you need to get through this day.
Turning the corner, he stopped short when he saw me. My height, plus the couple of inches my clogs gave me meant we were staring at each other eyeball to eyeball. The weak fluorescent light cast a green glow over his skin. His lips pressed together with suppressed rage, he took two steps toward me and stopped.
“How old is he?” he sputtered. “I thought you had more sense.”
Okay, high road not an option.
“You have no right.” I tried to control myself but my response was only a little bit shy of a shout. “None.” I sliced the air with my hand.
He came two steps closer. “Aside from the age thing, do you know how stupid it is to fuck your colleagues?”
I stepped back two steps. To stop myself from hitting him. “What I do and with whom I do it is my business. I don’t need your goddamned approval, O’Connor. He made me feel sexy, beautiful, feelings I haven’t felt for months. Years even. It might seem like settling for leftovers….” I was so cold and getting colder, like some essential spark was dying in me. I wrapped my arms around myself to try to stop the shivering. “Do you understand? I go home at night and I’m alone. Nobody’s in my bed asking me about my day. Nobody rubs my back. Nobody hugs me hello or good-bye. Aside from the fucking,” at this he winced, “it felt wonderful just to have someone hold me.”
I bit my lip in an effort not to cry. Smug, Catholic bastard. So easy for him. The wife, the children who adore him. “I…I haven’t had a man want me in a very long time.” The memory of Marc’s passion as he mouthed his way down my body with such obvious enjoyment warmed me just a little; God, how long had it been? “You face an empty house with an equally empty bed for two years and then you have the right to judge me,” I countered.
“I’m not judging you, Mary,” he said stiffly.
“Utter bullshit. It’s on the tip of your tongue just how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers I should say to atone for my sins.” I turned around and shuffled to my locker. A shaking hand fumbled uselessly with my combination lock. “Get out of here. I got fifteen minutes of sleep last night and have a double shift ahead of me. I need to pull it together.” I leaned my forehead against the locker. It was the only thing holding me up.
A hand, so gentle I barely felt it, turned me around. I twisted my head to the side, scrunching my eyes shut.
“Look at me, Mary.”
I shook my head.
“Please.”
Knowing this was a mistake, knowing I would hate what I saw, disgust, disappointment, the how-could-you in his eyes. I opened my eyes, steeling myself for his scorn.
What I saw was far worse.
“That’s not true,” he whispered. “He’s not the only man who…” and his face crumpled. His voice broke, followed by a deep breath so heavy with profound sadness that it threatened to bow him, to crush him under its weight.
I closed my eyes. “I know,” I whispered back. “Please go.”
Chapter Twenty
Forcing my feet to move, I stumbled into the shower and scrubbed away all traces of my desperate grab for desire. I dragged a toothbrush across my teeth, the mint-flavored toothpaste stamping out the last remnants of raspberry and cognac. Once dressed, I manage to negotiate my way to the dining room without breaking an ankle. I lifted a weak hand to greet the chefs’ table, the other gripping a coffee mug steeping with three tea bags of maté. I thought, fucking hell, I’ll never make it through this day.
Handing out assignments, my voice raw with exhaustion, I told my students I was fighting the flu, and if they had any questions I’d be at my desk trying not to barf. About 8:00 a.m., the maté kicked in full force. I pulled my aching body upright and found I could walk without feeling like my knees were missing.
I paired the people who’d worked in kitchens with people who’d only eaten in restaurants, praying that this would minimize the mistakes. O’Connor and I successfully avoided all contact. Right off the bat, I asked that he man the ovens (a completely ludicrous request as the person filling the oven should be responsible for unloading it), but he’d looked relieved and parked himself up in the little ante room containing the ovens.
Shortly after I’d pulled myself into a standing position, a student asked me if I’d check to see if his cookies were done. A quick sip of yet more maté (why is there never a double shot of tequila at your fingertips when you really need it), I followed her back to the ovens. Cupping a delicate paper cone filled with melted chocolate, O’Connor stood over a table practicing writing, those thick, strong hands engulfing the delicate parchment, hands that were meant to grasp a gun or a shovel. The hands of an Irish cop or farmer. And yet for all his strength, there was a sweet grace to that broad back as he gently pinched the paper cone so that the chocolate oozed out onto the stainless steel table in a continuous flow, forming letters as he moved the cone up and down.
“Are they done, Chef Mary?”
I coughed, trying to erase the hitch riding my voice. “They’ll taste better and won’t get stale as fast if you let them go another couple of minutes. You want to caramelize the sugar a little.”
At the sound of my voice, O’Connor’s back stiffened. With a swift scrape of the spatula against the stainless steel table, he wiped away all his handy-work. But not before I saw in perfect Catholic school cursive, the phrases, “Happy Birthday Aidan,” “I cannot,” “Happy Anniversary,” “Duty,” “Marriage,” and “Love.”
I returned to my desk, propping myself up on one elbow sipping maté, eyes open but seeing nothing. Physically and emotionally wrung dry, a student could be in flames and I wouldn’t have noticed. The words, “passion,” “loneliness,” “desire,” and “sin,” formed and reformed in my mind, and every time I tried to wipe it clean they reappeared in perfect Catholic school cursive.
***
Because of my near state of insensibility, I didn’t notice until it was nearly time for break that Coolie was wearing her Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, shades in class. Not that they didn’t complement in a weird way her checked pants, but this was the height of stupidity. Even in the glare of the overhead lights, anything that obscured your vision in a room filled with knives and bone-crushing equipment was equivalent to putting a sign on your back with the words, Hurt Me!
Icing a cake with such a deft hand I’d have sworn that she’d been doing it a lifetime, her spatula barely kissed the buttercream as she smoothed it over the sponge with enough buttercream to cover the cake completely, but not smother it. Normally, this takes hours of practice, cake after cake after cake to get the rhythm right. She probably could have done it blindfolded. And considering how dark were the lens of these glasses, she probably was.
I leaned over her and said into her ear, “Coolie, please take off the glasses. Not in the kitchen.” If I’d been my usual self I might have said something along the lines of sacrificing fashion for her art, but since every word took an inordinate amount of energy, I left it at the warning.
When we were just about to break for lunch, I saw Coolie, still sporting the sunglasses,
pushing a rack of completed cakes toward the walk-in. What the hell? When she’d put finished rolling the rack into the walk-in, I cornered her when she came out.
“Hey, I said no sunglasses. It’s dangerous. Off,” I ordered. The last thing I needed was for my favorite student breaking a leg because she tripped over a milk crate at her feet.
She lowered her chin. All I could see was the top of her paper chef’s toque shaking no.
“Coolie,” I snapped and pointed at my eyes.
Lifting her head, her body went rigid and then shuddered. With an impossibly long and elegant finger, the nail of which had been gnawed down to the nail bed, she slid the glasses down her nose to reveal a black eye. Someone had clocked her good; her left eye was almost swollen shut, the bruising and swelling looked fresh. Tears shimmered in the corner of her eyes before she shoved the glasses back up. Her mouth puckered and then quivered as she strained to keep from breaking down.
Students were pushing by us, arms full of crates of milk or struggling with filled stock pots, eager to get things put away before breaking for lunch. By not moving we were in danger of being trampled. I grabbed her by the arm and led her out of the kitchen into the dining room. We had a couple of minutes before the students started pouring in for lunch. I sat her down at a table. Huddling in her chair, her slim shoulders hunched forward in a painful U, she began fumbling with the salt and pepper shakers. She wouldn’t look at me, her chin resting on her chest, her eyes obscured by the glasses. She said nothing, leaving it up to me to begin.
“Did your boyfriend do this?”
“No,” she mumbled. “Don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Another student?” I tried not to sound too horrified.
A shake of the head.
“Someone I know?”
Another shake of the head.
“Mary,” a low female voice called to me across the dining room. Marilyn Cantucci.
“Dean Benson would like to see you in his office.” Twenty years of smoking had roughened her voice to a perpetual growl. Why does that sound sexy on Lauren Bacall, but on anyone else you wonder if they have a cancer specialist on speed dial? She flicked a quick glance Coolie’s way, dismissive and patronizing.
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