Today, a Saturday in mid-October, is the first time Beth has had to work a dinner shift. One of the reasons she took this job is because she was hired to cover breakfast and lunch. Today, though, Slick scheduled her for the dinner rush because all of his night cooks have been fired or quit. She feels like she should be home with her family in the evenings, even though in some ways, it’s nice to be at work. Her father’s house may be big, but it feels small with so many people living there.
Around about three o’clock, Slick comes into the kitchen, already with a five o’clock shadow, his hair excessively gelled and a little too long so that it’s bordering on a mullet. His upper lip is shiny even under the stubble. It looks wet, with sweat maybe. Beth feels repulsed by it.
“Beth,” he says. “Meet your new coworker, Paula.”
Linda’s mother. Beth used to babysit for this woman, bless her heart. She looks exactly the same as she did when Beth was a teenager: still thin and tan, still just as blond. She seems almost fragile, she’s so slight, and Beth doubts she’ll be able to keep up in the kitchen. Paula and her husband used to hang out with Steve and Deb. Beth was always jealous of their friend group, having nothing similar for herself.
“What happened to the other guy?” Beth says. He worked there for such a short time, she hadn’t even learned his name. Paula is the third coworker Beth has had since she started the job two weeks ago.
Slick just rolls his eyes, doesn’t even bother answering. No doubt the guy has quit. Of all people, Slick would go and hire Paula Williams. The way Paula looks at her, though, Beth doesn’t think Paula remembers her. Paula’s ignorance of Beth’s existence is almost as hurtful as the memories she brings up.
“I wasn’t expecting to have help tonight,” Beth says as Paula ties an apron around her waist. She never really liked Paula. Come to think of it, Paula is a lot like her daughter Linda. Both women act like the world owes them.
“What’d you think?” Paula says. “Slick was going to leave you high and dry back here?”
The nerve of her, Beth thinks. As if Beth can’t handle a dinner rush in this dumpy little greasy spoon.
What Beth doesn’t know is that Paula hates it here as much as Beth does, and for many of the same reasons. She hates the kitschy decor, hates the bland food, hates the feel of the restaurant. She hates that her life has come to this. The restaurant where she worked in Moab is one of those places the travel magazines feature for their amazing pancakes. As much as Paula hates to admit it, she doesn’t fit in this town anymore. She misses her dog. She misses her boyfriend. Or, well, fiancé. She misses him almost as much as she missed her daughters over the years, which surprises her. She didn’t think she would.
She should have just taken Jorge’s advice and hired a lawyer. She wants to go home, back to Utah, but she still hasn’t had a chance to talk to Jared. She wonders how he’s managed to avoid her so well in such a small town. He never seems to be at the hardware store when she stops in, and she suspects that he may be home more often than it seems, that Dinah and Skyla are covering for him. She’s a little ashamed to see how much like Dinah Skyla has become. Not just in her mannerisms, but in her loyalties. She doesn’t begrudge Skyla this. She knows she’s brought it on herself.
In the kitchen together, Beth and Paula are so wrapped up in their own issues, neither can manage to fall in sync with the other. When the orders roll in, both try to command the grill; neither wants to run the fryer, or worse, the salad station.
“I’ve got these burgers,” Beth says, wielding a spatula like a weapon. “If you want to grab those apps.”
Paula shakes her head, watching the grill flare up around the burgers. “You’ve got it up too high,” she says. She’s thinking now of Jorge, of the burgers he made the Saturday before she left for Michigan, the dry meat, the bitter char. The proposal. The fight.
Beth doesn’t bother to respond. She’s not sure what kind of Podunk restaurant Paula worked at previously, but clearly, the woman doesn’t know her way around a grill.
Paula fills a fryer basket with jalapeño poppers and lowers it into the grease. Beth shakes her head when the grease barely sputters at the frozen hors d’oeuvres. When the waitress, Bobby-Jo, places the next order, Paula pounces on the burgers, leaving Beth to make the salads.
“Did you wash this lettuce?” Beth asks from the salad station, holding a fistful of dripping iceberg lettuce.
“Lady,” Paula says, “I got here after you.”
“Slick did dinner prep tonight,” Bobby-Jo says. She’s standing on the other side of the line, holding her stomach and looking at the floor.
“You all right?” Paula asks.
“My stomach is off,” she says, traying the appetizers to take them out to the dining room.
“She’s probably been eating here,” Beth mutters when Bobby-Jo leaves. She slops together some dinner salads. What’s the point in making them look nice when the ingredients are so lousy? When she sets them in the window and calls for Bobby-Jo to pick them up, Slick comes in instead.
“Beth, I’m going to need you to cover the dining room,” he says.
She stares at him blankly, Jeanette’s stare. She doesn’t want to look at him and his wet lip.
“Did you hear me?” Slick says. “Bobby-Jo got sick. You’ll need to freshen up the bathroom, too, before taking her tables.”
“And there’s nobody else you can call in?” Beth says.
“What?” Slick says. “Are you too good to serve?”
Unbelievable. She literally cannot believe it as she takes off her white chef’s apron and switches it for a black server apron. She almost tells him that she is too good to serve, that she didn’t go to culinary school to wait tables. A few months ago, she would have, but then losing her job at the country club is what brought her to this godforsaken town in the first place. And so Beth swallows her pride, goes into the bathroom that smells like an outhouse—Beth reminds herself again not to eat the food—and sprays copious amounts of air freshener. She checks the stalls to make sure the poor girl hadn’t exploded in there. She hadn’t. Thank God for small favors.
* * *
• • •
Beth hasn’t waited tables in almost twenty years. She wasn’t good at it then, and she’s even worse now. She doesn’t want to talk to these people. She has no friends left in town. Once upon a time, Deb Williams had been her only real friend, but then Steve Brody got in the middle of it. It hurt to sacrifice her friend, but she’d thought she was in love. At the time it seemed a fair trade. Now she not only has no friends, but no man.
Even worse, Slick’s words echo in her mind: “Are you too good to serve?” The emphasis on you, like there’s something particular about Beth that makes her the logical choice. She’s always found serving to be humiliating; somehow, it’s even worse to serve people in River Bend.
She remembers a time in culinary school when a group of young professional men came into the restaurant and sat in her section. She served them bisque and salads and lamb chops and individual soufflés. And so much wine. Toward the end of the night, one of the men grabbed her ass. All evening, he’d been eyeing her in a way that made her feel like she was on the menu, and then he grabbed her.
At least nobody has grabbed her yet tonight. They complain about how slow her service is, and when she brings their food, they send their burgers back for being undercooked. (And oh, the righteousness she feels making Paula turn the grill back up.)
Along about eight o’clock, a couple comes into the Hudson House. The guy looks familiar to Beth, though she has trouble placing him, with his glasses and thick beard. The girl is young, maybe still in high school, with long honey-blond hair. She bears a striking resemblance to Paula. And then Beth puts it together. Paula’s husband.
“Jared,” Beth says.
Jared looks up at her, pushes his glasses higher to take her in.
“I go by Beth now,” she says, cringing at her old name.
“What’s good tonight?”
No pleasantries. That’s fine, Beth thinks. Let’s get this interaction over and done with. After taking his order, more memories click into place: Jared is not just Paula’s husband, but Deb Brody’s brother. She wonders whether he knows about her past with Steve. He was pleasant enough with her, so she doubts it, but then again, you never can tell with Midwesterners. He could very well be seething deep down. By the time she makes it to the kitchen, she’s already forgotten his order and has to go back out.
* * *
• • •
In the kitchen, Paula almost wishes Slick had asked her to wait tables instead of Beth. She would ask him to switch them, except she knows it would be a wasted effort. Beth had already argued with him, and he’d had to remind her who’s boss. No way would he change his mind now, even though Beth is no doubt costing him money with the number of orders she’s messing up.
In a way, Paula feels bad for Beth. She recognizes her as a bit of a kindred spirit. No doubt Beth hates schmoozing guests as much as Paula does. It probably doesn’t come naturally for her, either. When Beth enters the kitchen and flat-out forgets the order she just took, though, Paula feels less sorry for her.
“Get your head in the game,” Paula tells Beth. “Your fuck-ups are putting me in the weeds.”
“Don’t blame me because you can’t keep up,” Beth says.
“I could keep up fine if you’d only tell me the right orders.”
Beth pulls the latest order from the window and huffs back out into the dining room.
Paula doesn’t need this grief. What she needs is to find Jared. Get it done and get on home. Maybe she could try a sit-in at the Williams farm. The man has to come home to sleep, right? She isn’t sure, though. She was never good at reading her husband; he’s a master at keeping himself to himself. She tries to think of ways to get Dinah to let her in, and it occurs to her that she’s been working the wrong angle. She should be hitting up Skyla.
By the end of the dinner rush, Paula is ready to scream. Beth stands on the other side of the line, counting her tips.
“These cheap-ass West Michigan Dutch,” Beth mutters. Then she looks up and gives Paula a shitty grin. “Speaking of, Jared Williams sent his compliments to the chef.”
Paula’s stomach drops. “Jared is here?” she says, halfway through taking off her apron.
“He left maybe five minutes ago,” Beth says.
Paula stops. It’s an enormous effort not to reach across the line and slap the woman. “And it never occurred to you to tell me my husband was here?”
“Oh yeah,” Beth says, grinning even worse. She tucks her tips into her back pocket. “Y’all are married, aren’t you?”
Paula takes a deep breath and a step back, away from Beth. “Seriously?” Paula says, tying her apron back on. “Fuck you, Beth.”
And really, Paula and Beth could have been friends; they have enough in common. Instead, Beth realizes she’s made an enemy of Paula.
Elizabeth DeWitt
17
I take a second job in Kalamazoo, working at an erotic bakery, busting my ass to save enough for college. Most of our business is for bachelorette parties. The first project I’m given is an erection cake, a three-foot-high sculpture. It’s so long, we have to special order dowels to thread down the length of it. The testicles are ridiculously bulbous, or else the whole erection will topple over. Its head is almost as large as my head. I spend hours draping it in pristine white fondant, sculpting veins with royal icing along the shaft. On top of the baker’s table, the cake is taller than me by a couple of inches. I have to crawl up on a chair to sculpt the urethral opening.
“It’s not a vampire’s cock,” my boss tells me. “Paint it with the skin-tone food coloring. Put some hair on those balls. Make the veins a throbbing purple.”
But it pains me to ruin its perfect white. I want to dust it in powdered sugar. I want to cover it in wedding frosting. White, it still looks like a cake.
MEA CULPA
Beth pours her coffee, and instead of drinking it over the sink, she takes it out to the back porch. She’s been pushing herself to get out of bed more; the porch isn’t far, so it seems less overwhelming than going out. The only other person who uses the porch is her father. There are such gaping holes in the screens that mosquitoes crowd it in the summer, and earwigs weave their way around the floor. One lone folding chair sits by the door. Mostly the porch holds bags of garbage, fly-strewn and stewing in the sun, until somebody, usually Dan, gets sick of the smell and hefts them out to the bin behind the garage. But this morning is trash day, so all the bags have already been removed.
If this were Charlotte, she would sit on the front porch. Neighbors would wave as they passed, walking their dogs or going for a jog. She might not have had a lot of close friends in Charlotte, but people were friendlier there. At least the black people were. She misses that kind of low-stakes human interaction. Though the heat wave has broken, this morning is still warm for mid October, and the putrid sweet stench of trash lingers. Beth brings out a kitchen chair, better for her back than the folding chair, and sits with her coffee held up by her face, watching the steam condense on her eyelashes.
She doesn’t notice her father when he comes up from the garage, where he’d been replacing the catalytic converter in Derek Williams’s car. These automotive repairs are his sole financial contribution to his growing household. He sees Beth sitting alone, so self-contained that she appears to be in deep thought. No sense bothering her, he thinks, and continues on his way. This is the same thought Linda often has, and Dan and Jeanette, when Beth comes down from her room. She looks busy. Even when Beth is doing nothing at all: I don’t want to disturb her. So when Beth sits on the porch, or at the kitchen table, or in the living room, when Beth moves through the house, washing the dishes, cooking a meal, vacuuming the carpet, or dusting the bookshelf, her family often scatters, to give her space; Beth may have gotten out of her room, but she still has trouble getting out of her own head.
It’s not that Beth is oblivious to the effect she has on the family. More like, she feels perversely empowered by it. Simply by entering, she can clear a room so effectively that it seems like she has her own house. She knows her children are fed and clothed, that they leave for school each morning. But the details of the feeding, the clothing, the getting ready for school, these tasks belong to someone else. This must be how her ex-husband feels, when he calls to check in on the kids. Checking in is more like checking off: Yes, the kids are still alive. Check.
When Beth finishes her coffee, she has a second cup, and then a third, emptying the pot, bringing each cup out onto the porch to drink alone. As the fall has settled into Michigan, Beth has grown more and more tired, needing caffeine for all her waking hours. She doesn’t want to make coffee, doesn’t want to fuss with Linda’s imported beans or learn how to use her fancy coffee-maker, with its filters and temperature gauges and extraction times. She feels bad for having finished the pot, but instead of making more, she switches to tea, brewing a cup of dishwater from an old crinkled bag she finds at the back of the cupboard. She kind of likes it. She buys more at the dollar store: It’s her own silent protest, her refusal to buy anything nice. Linda won’t drink Beth’s tea. Beth offers it to her anyway, if Linda is slow to leave the kitchen when Beth enters. Soon, it seems to Beth that tea is the only thing in the house that is truly hers.
* * *
• • •
Beth is in the kitchen one day, making tea, when there’s a knock at the back door. She knows who’s on the other side. She thinks, He must know I’m alone in the kitchen, that I alone will hear him knock. And how easy it is, how naturally she goes to the door to find him there, standing on the back stoop.
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“Thought you could maybe use some company,” Steve says through the screen. She hasn’t seen him since she ran into him at the gas station. Up close, he’s older, of course—they both are—but the years seem heavier on him. His face is hard and tight, as if time has compressed it. There is visible sun damage on his bare scalp. Beth glances down to see that the screen door is locked.
“How’s Deb?” she says.
“I just want to talk,” he says. He’s studying her face, trying to match his memory of her to the woman before him.
“Like hell.”
“Who’s at the door?” Dan calls from the living room.
“Nobody,” Beth says. “He’s just leaving.”
“I swear, I just want to talk,” he says, his hand going for the doorknob. He slumps when he finds it won’t turn.
“There’s nothing left to say.” Twenty years ago, Beth would have flipped the lock and grabbed hold of him as if he were a life preserver. She should close the door and dead bolt it. Instead, she stands there, staring at the screen. He jiggles the handle like it’s stuck.
“Go home to your wife, Steve.” She can’t make herself close the door.
“Uncle Steve,” Linda says in the doorway to the living room. “Come on in.”
“He can’t stay,” Beth says.
“I can stay a little,” Steve says.
“God, Beth, don’t be rude,” Linda says.
Beth wants to smack the girl, wants to teach her how to speak to her elders, but a part of her knows that she, Beth, is the one who’s superfluous, the one who moved here out of necessity, not because Ernest wanted her here. So instead of fighting with Linda, Beth opens the door.
The House of Deep Water Page 13