“You’ve done great by me,” she said, and it was true. She hated making him feel otherwise.
Only after she got to college did she realize that she should have considered not just the cost of affording the school, but the cost of living among the kind of people who could easily afford it. Her friends might decide on a whim to go out for sushi if they didn’t like what was on offer in the dining hall. Sam wouldn’t join them. She knew from experience that Lexi and Isabella would order one of everything, and while she might get miso soup, the cheapest item on the menu, inevitably, when the bill came, someone would say, “Why don’t we just split it?”
The summer after sophomore year felt like any other summer. Sam slept in her childhood bedroom with its ballet-slipper wallpaper. She babysat on the weekends. On weekdays, she temped. Her longest gig was at an ad agency called Fleischer Boone. Her main job was to answer the phone and say “Fleischer Boone” in a professional-sounding voice.
Maybe a quarter of the time, it was her twelve-year-old sister, Caitlin, prank-calling her. “Fleischer Boone,” Caitlin would yell in an exaggerated southern drawl, before hanging up and doing it again. “Fleischer Boone! Our chicken is finger-lickin’!”
Any spare moments that summer were spent with Maddie, Sam’s best friend from high school, who was pre-med at Clemson. They walked the streets of their hometown free of the angst they’d felt before going to college. They were detached, observant. Visitors from a foreign land.
In July, Maddie saw an ad in the Globe for cater-waiters, offering twenty dollars an hour. They went to the training together. It was run by identical twin sisters in their fifties, who wore matching outfits. They taught the class how to serve in four styles—normal, fan, butler, and silver service—as well as the correct way to hold and pour champagne.
At home, Sam’s father teased her as she set the dinner table. “Not like that, Sam. We’re doing fan service tonight.”
In August, Sam’s college friends left for their study-abroad programs. She kept up with what they were doing through the photos they shared on social media—pictures of stunning architecture and plates of food and selfies taken with new friends. But it didn’t hit her that they were gone until she got back to campus. More to the point, that she was alone.
There were girls in the dorm and acquaintances from her classes whom she liked well enough to say hi to, or go to the movies with sometimes. But the college only meant what it did to her because of her friends.
Sam roomed with a girl who had skipped going abroad to play varsity soccer. She hardly ever saw her. The girl left for practice each morning before Sam was awake and ate in the one dining hall that stayed open late for athletes. Sam missed Isabella so much that sometimes she sat in that empty room and pretended she was about to walk through the door.
“The solitude will give you more time to paint,” her mother said, and it was true.
Sam spent long hours in the studio. She sometimes went on a Saturday night, when she knew she’d have the place to herself. But she would have traded that for Isabella any day.
Sam babysat a lot that year. She worked twice as many shifts in the dining hall as she had her first two years. She prepped meals, power-washed dirty dishes, took buckets of composted slop down to the gardens behind the stables that housed the horses some girls brought with them from home.
She had always loved Maria and Delmi, the Salvadoran women who worked full-time in the kitchen. If she hadn’t had their familiar faces in her life while her friends were gone, Sam wasn’t sure how she would have managed.
They had both worked at the college longer than Sam had been alive. But she tended to think of the kitchen as belonging to Maria.
Delmi had no end of friends who worked in other dorms, who stopped by throughout the day, whispering to one another in Spanish. She worked hard but was always happy to stop what she was doing and chat. Sam had once come upon her alone in the kitchen softly singing a Bon Jovi song into her cell phone in an attempt to win concert tickets from a local radio station.
Maria commanded authority in a way Delmi did not. Any outsider wandering in—a delivery guy with a cart full of boxes, a student worker from another dorm—instinctively approached her with their questions. Maria was petite and full of energy, a coiled spring. She had a pretty face and shiny brown hair and ripped upper arms. She always went above and beyond. She organized the pantry and alphabetized the recipe cards. She memorized the names of all the new students right away each September.
Sam’s mother liked to commend people who were particularly good at their jobs. Waiters, doctors, customer-service reps.
“It doesn’t matter what the job is,” she had told her children on many occasions. “It’s how well you do it that matters. I see it at the hospital all the time. Might be an orderly or a surgeon—some people just give their work their all. It makes life better for everyone around them.”
Sam told Maria this once, shyly. She said Maria made her think of it.
Of all the student workers in the kitchen, Sam had always been Maria’s pet. When she was working there her first year and started crying from homesickness, Maria hugged her and fed her cookies and made her laugh. She did the same when Sam’s grandmother died sophomore year. She asked Sam to bring back a rose from the funeral and had it pressed into rosary beads. When Sam passed the one math prerequisite she was forced to take to qualify for Latin honors, Maria presented her with a homemade cheesecake as a reward.
At the start of Sam’s junior year, when Maria introduced her to the newest member of the kitchen staff, the girl looked Sam up and down and said, “I know who you are. You’re Auntie Maria’s little favorite.”
“Sam, meet Gabriela, my charming niece,” Maria said, rolling her eyes.
Gabriela looked like Maria, but taller. She wore a diamond stud in her nose. Sam soon learned that she was twenty-three and had a baby, Josefine, a chubby one-year-old whose photograph Maria taped next to the weekly menu posted above the salad bar.
The photo was supposed to serve as a reminder to Gabriela. Maria was constantly telling her to watch her tongue, to take a deep breath before speaking.
All the student workers in the kitchen found her intimidating. Including Sam, at first. Gabriela made no secret of the fact that she didn’t have time for the stupidity of college girls who lived like slobs, assuming someone else would be there to clean up their messes.
Every day at lunch and dinner, Gabriela neatly filled the metal squares in the salad bar—the large one that held the greens, the four at the end containing different kinds of dressing, and the smaller compartments for things like sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, croutons, shaved carrots. Ten minutes into any meal, it was all a jumble. Gabriela would come out of the kitchen scowling and fix it so that no one would complain that there was tuna in the cottage cheese or Creamy Ranch in the Low-Fat Italian. Then the next wave of diners would mess it up, and she’d reemerge. Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill only to watch it roll down again.
Sam shared her frustrations.
When a senior from Connecticut left a puddle of Diet Coke on the floor under the soda dispenser, and Gabriela said, “Do these college girls wipe their own asses, or do they pay someone to do that too?” Sam silently thrilled at the comment.
When a transfer student asked, a bit rudely, for Gabriela to bring her some salt, she responded, “You’ve got legs in those yoga pants. Get it yourself.”
Sam burst out laughing then. Gabriela looked at her, as if seeing Sam for the first time. She smiled.
“Am I wrong?” she said as they walked back into the kitchen.
“No,” Sam said. “You say all the things out loud that I wish I could say. Gabriela, you’re my hero.”
“You can call me Gaby,” she said.
Overhearing this, Delmi and Maria both made a noise of astonishment and then laughed at their shared
reaction.
“What?” Gaby said.
From then on, Gaby and Sam chatted and joked through their shifts. Maria would tell them to get back to work, but always with a grin on her face. She liked that they were friends.
“Sam’s a good one,” Maria said once to her niece.
The comment filled Sam with pride.
Gaby wasn’t a substitute for her real friends, exactly. The two of them didn’t connect as easily; they didn’t like the same music or have much in common. Gaby was busy—she had a second job a few nights a week in the kitchen of a restaurant near where she lived, and otherwise had to get home to her daughter. But most Fridays after work, they walked downtown together to deposit their paychecks. They window-shopped and got coffee and talked. It was nice to have someone to do those things with.
Gaby said what she thought, and seemed not to care whether anyone liked her. Sam found this slightly terrifying and completely appealing. She sensed a sadness in Gaby too, which Gaby never talked about, but it came through when she mentioned that a lot of her friends had bailed when she had a kid. And when she told Sam that she hadn’t gone to college right away after high school; hadn’t seen the point. She worked retail; she worked in restaurants. At twenty, when most people were nearly done with school, Gaby enrolled at the local community college. She wanted to study bookkeeping, which was what her mother did. She worked days, went to school at night. But after three semesters, she got pregnant, and that was that. Something had to give.
Gaby loved her daughter fiercely. She found her mother annoying and controlling and hard to live with, but she was grateful that she had taken them in and that she helped so much with the baby, as did a cousin who took care of Josie while Gaby worked.
Gaby told Sam all kinds of secrets about the kitchen staff she never would have guessed. She told her Tina, a woman who had left abruptly midway through Sam’s first year, was only forty-five, even though she looked sixty; that she had been married four times; and that she had custody of her three grandkids because her daughter was a heroin addict. She told her Delmi’s husband had had an affair with some woman from their church, and Delmi had taken him back but now distrusted any female between the ages of sixteen and ninety who so much as looked at him.
Whenever there was a lull in their conversation, Gaby and Sam seemed to fill it by making fun of the students at the college. If there was something uncomfortable about this, Sam pushed it off. Of course, she was one of the students. But if Gaby saw her that way, she never would have chosen Sam to confide in.
One afternoon, as they scooped three hundred perfect spheres of chicken salad into chafing dishes, Sam told Gaby how Lexi used to ask her to set aside popular menu items for her when she was coming late to lunch, even though it hadn’t bothered Sam at the time. She told her how once Isabella, feet up on a chair after dinner, looked at her dirty plate and said, “Sam, would you mind? Since you’re going to the kitchen anyway?”
“I would have smacked her,” Gaby said.
Sam went on to say that Isabella had grown up with a mother who didn’t work, and yet the family employed a cook, a nanny, a maid.
“She’s just used to a ridiculous level of pampering,” Sam said. “Before she got to college, she’d never done laundry. I actually had to teach her.”
“This place is such a joke,” Gaby said. “Did you see that bullshit banner they hung across the college gates that says Celebrate Diversity? I laughed out loud.”
In a way, Sam thought, the college was pretty diverse.
Walking onto this campus had been a revelation for her—the transmen, the butch lesbians with shaved heads, the student in her studio art class who raised a hand and said confidently, “Please refer to me as they, not she.”
There were a lot of international students too.
Sam considered saying, “My friend Shannon is black and my friend Lexi is Korean and my friend Rosa is from the Philippines. Her dad’s a diplomat.”
But she knew that somehow the fact of her providing these examples would only prove Gaby’s point.
Instead, she told Gaby how Shannon was part of an elite program for African American scholars, and though it was an honor, Shannon said she sometimes felt tokenized on campus. She had been asked to participate in last year’s admissions brochure. When Sam said, “That’s so cool that they picked you,” Shannon just looked at her and said, “Gee, I wonder why.”
There was also the fact that the college celebrated diversity, but no one ever mentioned the women, mostly women of color, doing the work to prepare the food, to make the place beautiful, so the students could grow and learn and thrive. The housekeeping staff was almost entirely black, while black students made up just four percent of the student body. They studied historic inequality in their classes, they read about racial and economic injustice, and still they were expected to ignore this uncomfortable truth, to live with it.
One night in November, Gaby invited Sam to a party off campus. It was the first time she’d ever been to the home of someone not connected to the college, other than babysitting. The house was a small ranch on a cul-de-sac. There were a dozen cars parked out front.
They danced and took a lot of shots. Sam flirted with an extremely good-looking firefighter named Trevor, an acquaintance of Gaby’s from high school. At the end of the night, Sam made out with someone she thought was him, until Gaby told her Trevor had left half an hour ago.
“Who was that then?” Sam said, gesturing toward the guy whose tongue had been in her mouth moments earlier.
Gaby shrugged. She shook her head and laughed.
Sam went home for Christmas, and the whole time, she dreaded the return to school. Winters in this part of the world were particularly dreary. Especially without Isabella there to make them ramen in the hot pot, without Lexi’s hot chocolate spiked with cinnamon and rum. It felt like she was just running the clock until her friends returned.
A tiny ball of resentment formed in her. Why had it been so easy for the rest of them to go?
At the end of January, Isabella told Sam over Skype, “My parents said I can have a ticket to anywhere in the world for my birthday.”
“That’s so great,” Sam said.
She hoped her expression disguised her true feelings. She wished Isabella had told her in a text.
“I chose London,” Isabella said.
“You live in London,” Sam said.
“I know. It’s for you.”
“What? No way,” Sam said. “That’s too much.”
“You’ll come for ten days, over spring break. Which also happens to be my birthday week. You’ll stay with me.”
Sam’s mother told her to accept.
“You’ve been so miserable,” she said.
“No, I haven’t,” Sam said.
But the fact that she had the blessing of her mother, who had instructed her never to be indebted, especially to friends, was the push Sam needed.
On the plane, she asked for a gin and tonic just to see what would happen. The flight attendant brought her one without batting an eye. Sam had two more after that. She watched a romantic comedy and stared out the window at the clouds, vowing that she would never become the kind of person who found this anything less than astounding.
Isabella picked her up at Heathrow in a chauffeured car. She had developed a slight British accent and had begun using words like snog and cheers in casual conversation.
For the next two days, Isabella showed her London. She had spent so much time there with her parents over the years that the bellmen at the Four Seasons knew her by name. They went to tea at Brown’s. They toured Buckingham Palace and were certain they saw Kate Middleton going up a staircase, even as they knew it was probably not her. They walked through the Harrods Food Halls and looked at clothes neither of them would ever actually wear. They bought jeans at Top Shop. They went to a
bar with bottle service. Isabella put down her American Express before the bill had even arrived.
On Isabella’s birthday, Shannon came from Paris for the party. She looked thin. She told them the college provided all the students on her program a daily food allowance but that she skipped lunch most days and saved the money for the future purchase of Chanel sunglasses. She seemed more sophisticated than she was the last time Sam saw her. Shannon was so studious. At the college, she’d worn her old high school track pants to class most days. Now she had on flattering black jeans and a pair of boots made by some designer Isabella recognized on sight. The three of them drank champagne Isabella’s father had sent while they got ready. They had dinner with Isabella’s new boyfriend, Toby, who was on a year abroad from Georgetown.
“It’s pretty serious, you guys,” Isabella whispered when he went to the bathroom. “We share a Netflix account.”
Shannon met Sam’s eye and shook her head, amused.
The party was at a bar called the Zoo in the middle of Leicester Square. There were at least a hundred people there to celebrate Isabella. Sam wondered how she’d had time to make this many friends since August.
Isabella led her around by the hand. She kept telling everyone, “Sam is my birthday present!”
Isabella ordered them each a drink called the GTV. When Sam asked what was in it, Isabella looked shocked by her ignorance.
“Gin, tequila, and vodka,” she said.
“God,” Sam said.
She drank half, then told Isabella she had to pee.
“I’ll come!” Isabella said.
“That’s okay,” Sam said. “I’ll be right back.”
As happy as she was to see her, Sam had forgotten how exhausting Isabella could be, how much energy she required.
The bathroom line was thirty women deep. Sam remembered seeing a McDonald’s across the road. She ducked out of the bar without telling anyone and went straight there.
Friends and Strangers Page 8