The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  So Janice lived at home. Kitty imagined her hiding in her bedroom, painting on eyebrows and then frantically wiping them off at the sound of her father’s cruiser in the driveway.

  “Your dad’s a cop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I work at my brother’s truck-washing shop. But he only gives me part-time.”

  Kitty looked up the block to see if she recognized any of the trannies gathered around the bus shelter across Western. She tried to picture clumsy, moon-faced Janice working the corner with them. Really, she had no idea what Janice wanted. Was it just to sit in a bar wearing a dress and drinking a cocktail she’d learned about on a television show? For all she knew, Janice might have a bold secret life, performing anonymous sex acts in the public toilets of Van Nuys. Maybe what she wanted was exposure—for her father to catch her out here and banish her for good.

  On their way back to the bar, Janice caught her heel in a storm grate. She grabbed for Kitty but missed, and she ended up in a sitting position on the high curb.

  “Are you okay?” Kitty asked, reaching down.

  “I shouldn’t have been walking around without my glasses on.” She tried to stand up, then skipped sideways, supporting herself on Kitty’s arm. “Oh,” she said, “I broke my shoe.” She lifted her foot, and the heel dangled. Kitty saw that she was wearing pantyhose, which struck her, for some reason, as almost unbearably sad.

  “Look,” she said, “I just live a few blocks away.”

  Janice followed Kitty up the exterior stairs to the apartment, pulling herself along by the railing and hopping on her good shoe. “I know that smell,” she said, sniffing at the air. “What is it?”

  “Peppercorn.” Kitty pointed to a massive tree, the only thing growing in the dirt-lined courtyard. Its delicately filigreed leaves drooped like willow branches, and the ground underneath was littered with pink and white berries. The fragrance followed them inside.

  It was still winter back in Philadelphia, but the weather here had become mild already, and Kitty had left the window overlooking the courtyard open. As they walked into the apartment, the repeating tones of a car alarm started up—Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! BeeBEE, beeBEE, beeBEE; WEE-uh WEE-uh. Kitty pulled the window shut. “That’ll go on for hours,” she said.

  “Is it coming from your driveway?”

  “Believe it or not, it’s a bird—a mockingbird, I think. It showed up in the peppercorn tree a few weeks ago. Which, you know, doesn’t bother me as much as a real car alarm would. You kind of have to admire the damn thing.”

  Janice sat on the couch while Kitty went in the other room and rummaged through the pile of shoes on the floor of her closet, trying to find something she would like.

  “Is this your family?” Janice called out.

  “On the end table? The guy with the moustache and the two little kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s me and my brother and our dad. They’re both back in Cambridge.”

  “What does he do?”

  “My dad? He teaches college.”

  “You-all get along?”

  Kitty had talked to her father that morning. She missed him terribly, and her brother, too. He was planning to come out after his semester ended. She looked forward to showing him all the things she’d discovered out here already. Alpine Village, Eaton Canyon, the Western Exterminator sign on Temple, the terrazzo sidewalks downtown, the old cafeteria that was decorated with redwood murals and dusty taxidermy.

  “He’s okay,” she said.

  Most of her shoes were plain and utilitarian: sneakers, work boots, job-interview loafers; none of these would do. She had a pair of strappy heels in here somewhere that she’d bought for the office Christmas party. And then she remembered that, of course, none of her shoes were going to fit, because Janice was a man, with man-sized feet. She found a pair of sandals and adjusted the buckles as far as they would go.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, offering them to Janice. “These are kind of ugly, but see if you can get them on.”

  Janice wedged a sandal onto her right foot. When she stood up, her heel hung off the end.

  Kitty’s phone beeped inside her pocket. She dug it out and saw she’d missed a call from Anton. She’d forgotten all about him. Watching Janice straighten her wig and check her lipstick in the mirror by the door, Kitty thought of the journey she’d made that evening: over the Cahuenga Pass and down into East Hollywood, where the beautiful Shalimar had met her doom on a streetlit sidewalk.

  Janice hesitated outside the bar, suddenly embarrassed about her shoes.

  “See how crowded it is?” Kitty said, opening the door a little so she could peek inside. “No one’s going to notice your feet.”

  The room was packed now. A haze of cigarette smoke hung over the bar. The music was louder, and the voices competing with it had multiplied in the last hour. Scanning the room for familiar faces, Kitty spotted Anton, who had staked out a table in the corner next to the jukebox. He stood up when they came over and caught Kitty off-guard with a cheek-grazing double kiss. Donna Summer moaned orgasmically.

  “Anton, this is Janice,” yelled Kitty, “Janice, Anton.”

  He took Janice’s hand and kissed it. Kitty saw that the seam under her right arm had split a little.

  “Will you excuse me?” Janice said, “I have to go to the ladies’.”

  “Your friend is a vision,” Anton said when she’d gone. His eyes twinkled. “Did you pick her up on the Boulevard?”

  “She’s from Van Nuys,” Kitty said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “What do you think of the Searchlite?” He gestured magnanimously across the room, as though the scene were something he had invented for her delight.

  “I think we’re tourists,” she said, realizing her mistake. She considered her options. She didn’t want to abandon Janice, but then she wasn’t sure she was needed, or even relevant. “Will you excuse me? I have to go to the ladies’, too.”

  Just as she turned away from him, the front door banged open. For a moment nothing else changed: Donna Summer kept moaning. The girl in the orange fur jacket kept shimmying with her back to the door. Then a wedge of uniformed cops streamed in. The jukebox went dead, and all Kitty could hear was trannies screaming and cops yelling.

  “Against the back wall, hands out, everyone hands out!”

  Cops were pulling girls out of the bathrooms and swarming behind the bar. When the lights came on, Kitty saw the cap-sleeved girl with the hi-top sneakers on the ground, a cop pressing her face into the muddy floor and twisting her arm behind her back. Another cop braced his foot against the threshold of the ladies’ room and yanked Janice out by both wrists. She made a break for the door, her eyes wide with fear or excitement, but he grabbed her by her waist and threw her against the back wall.

  “Hands,” he yelled, “hands!” as he dumped the contents of her pocketbook on the floor.

  Anton and Kitty stood behind their table, ignored in the chaos. Finally, a cop came over and, despite the bright overhead lights, shined his flashlight over their faces.

  “IDs out,” he said.

  Kitty gave the cop her license. He passed his beam over it and handed it back. Anton dropped his wallet. When he stooped down to pick it up, his glasses fell off.

  “It’s okay,” the cop said, holding up his hand. “You’re both free to go.”

  Anton didn’t call her, and she didn’t call him, though she eventually went through his whole list. At the Escape Room she met a woman named Diane who lived upstairs in the Kipling Arms. One-Eyed Jack’s was inexplicably closed on a Thursday night the first time she stopped by, but the next time she found it open and sat at the bar—a big square corral in the middle of a cement room. An old lady, mistaking the stranger on the next stool for Kitty’s date, tried to get him to buy her a rose.

  The Monte Carlo had a pool table. She shot a game of eight ball with a guy who was painting buildings that stood in all the
places where Charles Bukowski had once lived. He showed her snapshots he’d taken of a Pollo Loco on Vermont and a blood lab on Hollywood Boulevard. “Right where we are standing,” he told her, “was a boarding house run by a Filipino man, and that man was Bukowski’s landlord.” She told him his reverence was misplaced.

  When she drove past the Searchlite, she sometimes thought she saw a familiar face among the girls smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, but she didn’t see Janice. Janice was back in Van Nuys at her father’s house, or she was washing trucks, or she was somewhere else in the city of night.

  FOOD & BEVERAGE

  The Breakfast Shift

  I spent my twenties leaning over the classified section of the Globe, pencil in hand. Actually, though, I only ever got one job from the Help Wanteds: waiting tables at a greasy spoon over by Boston City Hospital. I reported to the address on Washington Street without expectation and filled out an application at the faux Fifties counter. I was so accustomed by then to thinking of myself as unemployable that I was shocked when the manager, a rheumy-eyed drunk with a thinning white pompadour, hired me on the spot for the breakfast shift. He told me to come back in the morning, and then he didn’t seem sure who I was when I tapped on the locked glass door at 5:45 a.m.—still half-dreaming but ready to work the six to two-thirty.

  Recession, a lack of ambition, and vague artistic leanings had stranded me in a low-grade bohemian funk, and it felt good to have somewhere to be for a change. My bicycle commute—through banks of vaporous streetlight, past the wet sidewalks and dark doorways of the deserted pre-dawn South End—felt spooky and glamorous, like I’d fetched up in a strange city. No one I knew went to bed at nine p.m. Friends, confused by my new schedule, stopped calling for fear of waking me up. A beer after work now meant drinking at 2:30 in the afternoon, which meant drinking with people who drink at 2:30 in the afternoon, which in turn put me in specialized company. The combined effect was, for a while, pleasantly dissociative.

  I never got used to waking up early. Each workday began in a slowly dissipating dream-state: the dark, sleepy passage through empty streets; the arrival at the locked glass door from which spilled the only light on the block; the silent cigarette-and-coffee interlude leaning side-by-side against the counter with Lloyd, the breakfast cook, who was tall and handsome and jet-black, and who, in his white, mushroom-shaped toque, made me think somewhat guiltily of the man on the Cream of Wheat box. Then the rheumy-eyed manager would open up and let in the first customers—usually delivery truck drivers—before passing out on a lawn chair in the stockroom.

  With that, the engine of the day turned over, setting in motion the thousand trivial urgencies of waitressing. The delivery drivers ate their eggs and paid their checks, passing on their way out the Boston Edison workers who arrived in groups of three and four, identical in their winter Carhartts, then table-hopped, creating an atmosphere of screwball anarchy. And as I struggled to keep track of their orders, and as they helpfully passed the plates to one another, the sun would rise unnoticed. Then the civilians started coming in and ordering pancakes, and by the time I had a chance to look out the window, the breakfast rush was winding down and my shift was half over. Another cigarette break, and then construction workers from nearby building sites began showing up for their blue-plate specials. Lunch rush, an hour of stragglers, some sidework—refilling ketchup bottles, wrapping silverware in paper napkins—and my workday was done. In the middle of the afternoon, a time of day when I would normally have been drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee hunched over the Help Wanteds, I would get on my bike and ride home. Or, having put in a full day’s work, I might head over to Lou’s, a cavernous taproom around the corner where the clientele largely overlapped with ours.

  Our customers had nothing to do with Boston City Hospital, although we were practically in its shadow. Even with the pass-through traffic—cabbies and hard hats, artists drifting over from the warehouse district to the east—our greasy spoon, which had only been there for a moment and would be gone a moment later, was a local joint. It surprised me to find that the late-night bar scenes I’d worked as a cocktail waitress, for all their sleazy drama, couldn’t touch this place when it came to street theater. Midway through my first shift, an old man slipped on some ice cubes, and I rushed across the room to help him up. He was shaking like a wet sparrow as I steered him to a chair, but before I could sit him down, the manager grabbed his other arm and gave him the bum’s rush out the door.

  “Guy takes a dive in here every other week,” he said offhandedly. “He’s got a park-bench lawyer on retainer.”

  I learned about the change-for-a-twenty short con a few days later. I was filling in for the cashier, ringing someone up at the takeout counter, when a man came in off the street.

  “How you doing this morning, Sunshine?”

  In fact, he’d caught me in a good mood: a few days under my belt, getting my sea legs, enjoying the brisk, purposeful clack and chime of the cash register. He bought a can of Pepsi, paying with a twenty.

  “Say,” he said as I counted his change out on the counter, “can I trade in some of these extra ones while you’ve got the till open? I’ve got, let’s see, fifteen ones and a five . . .”

  Lloyd leaned over and slammed the register drawer shut with his spatula.

  He was right to keep an eye on me, because I was idiotically smitten by the flimflammers. But the regulars were at least as interesting. There was, for instance, an older black gentleman who wore fastidious tracksuits and drank Earl Grey tea. I would have singled him out in any case for the elegant way he had of angling his chair out from under the table and crossing his long, velour-clad legs; that is, I would have noticed him even there weren’t usually a line of people near his table, waiting for an audience with him. I recognized his name when Lloyd spoke it; he was a neighborhood activist who had recently run for mayor. Against every expectation, he’d nearly defeated a well-connected Southie Irish pol—a ham-faced baby kisser apparently sent over from central casting to replace the preceding ham-faced baby kisser. That part of the South End was still a black neighborhood at the time. Though white money had begun its inexorable march up Mass Ave, many of those grand brownstones still sheltered widowers with cardboard suitcases renting furnished rooms by the week. In this part of Boston, the activist might as well have been elected. Like Mayor Curley at his kitchen window, he kept office hours in the back of our restaurant so that the widowers and their landladies and everyone else could petition him for help with wayward children or SSI applications or utility company disputes or civil service exams.

  The menu gave a nod to soul food, for which the neighborhood was then still known. We served salty greens shimmering with fat, and sweet potato pie, and you could get grits with your eggs. And then there was all the ham, which I cannot think of without remembering the Hamily: three young black women and a baby who came in almost every morning. One was tall and thin and had a wig like a girl-group bouffant. The other two were very fat. The fatter and younger of them was light-skinned, with smooth red hair and freckles. The baby must have been hers, because it always sat in its car seat on a chair next to her. They ordered ham every morning—ham and eggs, or ham omelets, or just great slabs of ham steak—so we called them “the Hamily.” I assumed they were hookers, and probably junkies too, because they drained the entire sugar jar into their coffees every morning. They didn’t tip much, usually no more than a few sticky dimes and quarters, but I missed them on the mornings when they didn’t come in. And when I spotted one or another of them on the street, it seemed somehow auspicious.

  To understand what the Hamily meant to me, it would help if you’d waited on tables. It didn’t come naturally. I was, I suppose, competent, but I had to remind myself not to look agitated; to sympathize with someone who’d asked for rye toast and gotten wheat. “It ain’t that hard,” said Lloyd. “Just do what they say do.” Which was only sort of right, because the key to waitressing is not efficiency or stamina or the ability to
calculate a six percent meal tax on the fly. Waiting tables, like prostitution, is largely a matter of play-acting. I knew this, but I willfully blew my lines in the scenes we all ran through every morning.

  “Why are women like tornadoes?” a cabbie nursing his bottomless cup of coffee at the counter might ask.

  “Okay, why?”

  “They moan like hell when they come and they take the house when they leave.”

  In such exchanges I had the options of hilarity and shock, but I was stubborn and usually chose a third way: indifference. If this was received as prudishness or abraded feminist sensibilities (which amounted to the same thing as far as I was concerned), I’d bristle at the idea that I could be offended. Meanwhile, the Hamily gummed their ham slabs serenely, geologically, requiring nothing from me but ham and coffee and a full jar of sugar. Rightly or wrongly, I took them for kindred spirits.

  After a while, I was riding to work under a pale sky; then, as spring approached, a weak dawn. Soon it was warm enough to prop open the kitchen door. I’d take my mid-morning cigarette break while Osman, the doleful Turkish prep cook, peeled potatoes, the oud music on his boombox pulsing under the noise of the dishwasher. As soon as weather permitted, the manager abandoned the lawn chair in the stockroom and began napping in his station wagon—a Pontiac Safari that barely fit in the narrow brick alley leading out to Washington Street. From the kitchen door I could see the top of his pompadour lolling on the bench seat. Above, the back wall of the hospital, and the A/C condenser looming over the alley, and beyond that, a patch of sky.

  I’d had my doubts about the breakfast shift, but in some ways I found the routine agreeable—even a relief. Where there was no choice there was no anxiety. I stopped looking for meaning in how I spent my time and who I spent it with. What I did was I worked, and the people around me were my co-workers and my customers. That was the meaning of our relationships, and to investigate further was pointless.