by Thom Whalen
* * *
Two days later, Saturday, Gwen came in with a shiner. She’d tried to cover it with makeup, but it’s pretty hard to hide that much bruise around the eye.
I didn’t see it at first. Most mornings when she came in, she made some cutting comment to me. Sometimes telling me not to be shy with the salt on the fries or that I should take the onions off the grill before they turned completely black; more often asking me if I was still cherry or telling me that offering a girl a joint would get me laid quicker than offering a wedding ring. She was quite a card, that Gwen.
She was probably right about the joint. I imagined that girls who smoked up shed their panties pretty easily. Grass and sex seemed to go together, those being the twin pillars of hippie culture. But I didn’t partake. Columbia was a competitive school and I wouldn’t make the grade if I dulled my edge with grass. Maybe if I were in literature or drama or something but not in math. Stoners didn’t win Fields Medals.
I wondered if I could give a girl a joint without smoking it myself. I’d never been to a pot party, so I didn’t know the etiquette of such things. Gwen probably did, but I wasn’t about to ask her. She already figured me for a dork. I didn’t need to prove it.
It’s a cruel world that forces a guy to choose between math and sex.
So that morning, I found it strange when Gwen walked past me without looking at me or putting me down.
When she hung the first order of the day, from Craughton and Barkley, I caught her eye. She stared back at me like a deer in the headlights. First I noticed that her face looked lopsided, then I realized that her left eyelid and cheek were swollen. Looking closer, I saw that her left eye was tinged red and her eye socket was bluish underneath her makeup.
I was stunned.
She broke eye contact and turned away before I could think what to say.
“Gwen has a black eye,” I said when I turned back to the grill.
“What?” Randal asked, turning to look out at the front.
“I’m no expert, but it looks to me like Gwen has a black eye.”
Randal left the grill and went to the counter to stare at Gwen. “Order up,” he said, though I was still cooking Barkley’s liver.
She came to the counter. “Where’s the order?”
“What happened?” he asked.
“Ran into a doorknob,” she said. “Where’s my order?”
“Billy’s the biggest knob I know,” Randal said.
“I took care of him,” she said.
“He still wasting good air?”
“I can handle my own problems.”
“If he’s still out there somewhere, breathing, then it’s not handled.”
“It’s handled all that it needs to be handled.”
“Do you know where he’s staying?”
“He’s going to stay away from me so you got to stay away from him. You can’t afford to get tangled up in this.”
“I already am.”
“No. You’re not involved.” She looked past Randal’s shoulder. “Hey, Cherry Boy, you got my order, yet?” She had taken to calling me Cherry Boy. To prove the moniker apt, I blushed cherry red every time she said it. My blush amused her so she was never going to stop.
“Coming up.” I put the liver on a paper plate and Mrs. Craughton’s food on china.
“Give it to me,” she said.
Randal looked like he was going to say something else, but decided against it. He turned, grabbed the two plates out of my hands and pushed them across the high counter. “Order up.”
She put the food on her tray and left.
Barkley yipped when he saw her coming with the liver.
I wanted to ask who Billy was, but Randal looked angry. My better judgment told me to keep my mouth shut. An angry Randal is a scary Randal. Actually, any Randal is a scary Randal, but an angry Randal is over-the-top scary. Whoever Billy was, he was in trouble if Randal found him.
I was being careful to say, “Hi,” to Katie when she came and, “Bye,” when she left, but had found little opportunity to talk to her since that first time. Most days, her shift ended before I took my break. It was only on Gwen’s days off that she worked a longer shift and needed to take a break when I did.
Today, though, I took my break a bit early to make sure that I was going out the back door at the same time as her.
“You taking your break?” she asked as I held the door open for her.
“Yeah.”
“That looks good.”
I looked down at the chili-cheese-dog in my hands. I’d put grilled onions on it. I was beginning to see the wisdom in Randal’s rule that cooks didn’t eat what the customers ate. We could do better than that.
“You want one?” I asked her. “You can have this one and I’ll whip up another one for myself.” Mrs. Everett wasn’t around and Randal didn’t care what I cooked for myself.
“No, thanks,” she said. Then she looked down at the bit of gastronomic delight in my hand and reconsidered. “Well, maybe I could have a bit. Not half, just a couple of bites.”
“Sure. Why don’t I meet you at the table.” I dashed back inside and cut a third of the dog off and put it on a plate for her.
I was half-afraid that she’d be gone by the time I got back – I’m embarrassed to say that it wouldn’t have been the first time that a pretty girl had ditched me – but she was sitting there, waiting, lovely as a movie poster.
I imagined her in a fur bikini like Raquel Welch in One Million, B.C. The thought made me blush; and blushing made me blush even more.
“You didn’t have to run,” she said, misinterpreting my red face. “I wasn’t going anywhere.”
She spoke as though she knew that pretty girls were likely to disappear on me when I wasn’t looking. My face grew hotter.
She laughed lightly. My potential humiliation was a joking matter to her.
“Gwen has a black eye,” I said, blurting the words out in my haste to cover my embarrassment.
She stopped laughing. “I know. She said that she ran into a doorknob but I don’t see how that could happen. They’re too low to run into with your face.”
“Randal thinks that a guy named Billy hit her.”
“Billy?”
“I’m pretty sure that he’s the guy that dumped her tray a couple of days ago.”
“He’s called Billy?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Makes sense, I guess. If he could dump her tray, he could sure hit her. He looked nasty enough for it.”
“So you don’t know anything about it?”
“Not as much as you do, apparently.”
Darn. “So she didn’t say anything about getting hit or Billy or getting her tray dumped?” I asked.
“No. We don’t have as much time to chat out front as you and Randal in the kitchen.”
“Randal and I don’t chat much.”
“Oh.”
The pause lasted long enough to get awkward. I ate a few bites of my chili-cheese-dog and Katie nibbled at hers.
“So, did you get a chance to look at the deadline for applying to dental hygiene programs?” I asked.
She looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. “Dental hygiene?”
“Yes. You said that you wanted to be a dental hygienist.”
“I told you that?” She frowned. “I guess I did. But when I thought about it, I didn’t think that I’d like poking around in people’s mouths all day. It would be kind of yucky.”
“I can see that. Being a waitress is more interesting in a lot of ways.”
“Oh, I don’t want to be a waitress. Not after the summer. I think I’m going to quit in September and hitchhike to San Francisco. They’ve got communes out there. You can live on them for free. I’d like to be free like that.”
“There are communes here, too,” I said. The only thought in my mind was that women practiced free love in communes. If Katie wanted to live on a commune, that had to mean that she wanted to practice free
love, too. I wanted some of that so bad that it hurt.
“Yeah. But it’s cold in the winter here. San Francisco is in California. It’s warm and sunny out there in the winter. You can swim all year around.”
I’d never been to California, but I was pretty sure that San Francisco was in Northern California and that wasn’t quite so warm and sunny as in Los Angeles.
“And they have a nice zoo there. I saw that on a TV show. I could live on a commune and go to the zoo and commune with the tigers. I’d like to be friends with a tiger.”
“Sure. As long as it’s in a cage.” A tiger would be more likely to see her as dinner than as a buddy.
“Oh, they don’t have cages there,” she said. “That was what the TV show was all about. How it’s a special zoo because the lions and tigers and bears aren’t in cages. But you don’t have to be scared of them because they know that they’re in a zoo and won’t hurt you.”
I tried to figure out what she was talking about.
“And the other good thing about San Francisco is that it’s right next to Tijuana. You can walk right across the border into Mexico any time you want.”
“I think you mean San Diego.” I remembered my American geography. “San Diego is in the south, right next to Mexico. San Francisco is in the north, closer to our latitude.”
“Oh, no. It’s in California. I’m sure about that.”
I didn’t know much about girls, but I knew enough to know that it would do me no good to try to teach her about California geography. If she ever got out there, she could explore the state for herself.
“You’re right,” I said. “Exactly right. San Francisco is in California, all right.”
She beamed.
“That was good.” She swallowed the last bite of her share of my chili-cheese-dog.
“Any time you want one of your own, just let me know and I’ll make one for you. Grilled onions and all.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“As long as Mrs. Everett isn’t around. I don’t know if she likes us going off the menu.”
“Anyway,” she said. “I better get going.”
She left.
I went back into the kitchen, thinking, That went pretty well. It was my second real conversation with Katie and she hadn’t told me to get lost yet. I was halfway to not being a virgin any longer.
It was a terrifying thought, but I was a brave boy.