The Journey Prize Stories 27 Read online

  We have two head waiters, John and Steve. They both have wispy blond hair, little moustaches, and rectangular chrome-framed glasses. John moves like a premier danseur from the Bolshoi, while Steve walks like he has a pickle up his ass. The problem with Steve is that he is a born-again sanctimonious asshole who just can’t leave shit alone. “Bronwyn,” he says, “check the table bottoms for chewing gum. Kitchen will give you a putty knife to scrape it off.” For an extra twenty cents an hour, Steve takes the head waiter thing pretty seriously. He’s gunning for the title of evening shift manager. He probably has wet dreams about getting it embossed on his plastic name tag, like getting a medal pinned on his chest. Lots of folk have a narrow compass, see only the part of the world that fits between horse blinders; but Steve’s gaze rules a microcosm that contracts into the crosshairs of a rifle sight: pop-gun tyrant of serviette dispensers, invigilator of the extra creams. We’re all just moving targets. He is a cardboard parody of the dinner table dictator who I tried to leave behind. It’s been over two weeks since I got the hell out of there, but my brain still drags some luggage along. The filial Sunday dinner switches on in my head.

  Dad sounds like he’s loud, but he’s not. He’s just got righteous intensity. That’s a different thing, he says, than those neurotics, always flying off the handle. “Ed Sullivan should be shot for what he did,” says Dad, staring me down like it is news, like I’ve done something wrong. “Take your elbows off the table, Bronwyn. Bringing the Beatles to America; what insanity he let loose on this generation of heathens.” I just keep eating. Beatles got their place in history but I’m not old enough to remember them as a band, and Ed Sullivan is dead. My music is Poly Styrene, Lou Reed, Bowie, Queen, Joan Jett, Sex Pistols, Siouxsie Sioux: no point in saying so.

  Dad complains that Diefenbaker scrapped the Arrow and that Trudeau, French and effete, joined Ed Sullivan’s conspiracy. “Beatle-mania, Trudeau-mania. Mob psychology,” he says. “All those kids screaming like rabid animals. No discipline. Is that roasted chicken? Damn that rock and roll and those crazy hippies. What we need is another war. Pass the green beans. Please! What do you think about this women’s lib malarkey, Bronwyn?” It’s not a question. It is a test for The Amazing Kreskin. He wants me to read the secret answer in his head, not tell him what I really think.

  I dress like a boy because girls can’t do shit if they dress like girls, and what I really think is that Dad can take a great word like liberation and make it sound like a bad taste in your mouth, like something loud and fat and embarrassing: lip or lipid or libido. I haven’t heard the term hippie since grade five, and Trudeau is old, and malarkey comes from the kind of brain that’s been mummified in a Canopic jar. There’s a new indie-punk glam scene that comes in from campus stations late at night on my clock radio, and those new rocker chicks and club queens and androgyny philosophers are taking over from white-boy cock-rockers like The Who and The Stones and Rush and Styx; and I’m trying to figure out why all the cool black rock-and-rollers are selling their souls to disco, and why the hell Grace Jones is singing synthesized Broadway tunes when she could be kicking ass with real skin drums. My dad says there’s a generation gap. It’s the fucking Grand Canyon. All he sees is this freckled kid who doesn’t say what’s in her head and he makes her feel dumb and small.

  He has piercing blue eyes. He can make you feel ashamed for nothing; like shame is made of live seeds germinating in a forbidden-fruit core. The shame seeds sprout in my stomach like kudzu vines, invasive, embarrassing, with budding leaves that grow out my nose and ears. They creep up the glands in my throat and get in the way when I swallow. I’ve taken a chicken leg that I can’t eat. The shame in my throat gets bigger when I think about the dead chicken. It’s my job to feed the chickens. They come when I call them, let me take their eggs, and then my dad chops their heads off and we pluck them and eat them. I just shut up and help Mom clear the plates.

  Mom’s still dressed up from church, sort of. She’s wearing the floral cotton dress that she made with a Vogue pattern: high femme. She even made the matching cloth-covered buttons. But the weather is too cold and the farm house is too drafty for the dress, so she’s got a plaid lumber jacket draped over her shoulders and she’s taken off her good shoes and put on grey work socks, the kind that are made of itchy wool and have the little white-and-red band at the top. Over the socks, she’s got on a pair of men’s Kodiak work boots. She says nothing, but she’s smiling. She is fifteen years younger than my dad. I went through her nightstand once to try to figure her out. No diary, no pills, no makeup, just a little jar that said vanishing cream. You think she’s right there, but she’s not: receding like the Cheshire cat until all that’s left is her smile and her busy hands. My grandpa pounds the table with his fist, vehemently agreeing with my dad: “Kids today; and that music—no religion, no respect.” He knows the script so well he doesn’t need verbs. In his time music was decent. Men were men.

  Dad dropped out of grade eight and started working in a Pittsburgh steel mill, turning gun barrels on a metal lathe at fourteen. That’s what it meant to be a man. “When I was your age,” says my dad, “we didn’t have milk. We just poured coffee on our oatmeal.” He had the last of his teeth all pulled when he turned thirty-three, just after getting married. He clicks his dentures together and smiles as Mom takes the percolator off the gas stove and fills his cup with coffee. Her grandmother’s inheritance paid for his dentures. It’s an open secret. She thinks of her silence as dignity, appropriateness. It’s the routine, the predictability that creates our roles, our purpose; a meaningfulness that seals away the sin of doubt.

  Sunday dinner is always served at noon. Mom puts the chicken in the oven before church, comes back, and serves it. She gets up and down during dinner, checking the pie, picking up dropped utensils. Then she washes the dishes. Dad gets annoyed if Mom leaves any dirty cooking pots in the sink while we’re eating. “Dirty dishes are unsightly and unsanitary,” he says. “Discipline,” he says, “discipline and faith: that’s what makes people strong in the face of terror. It’s the narrow gate that guides a soul from the path of destruction.” He will not allow us to work on the Sabbath, except for Mom cooking and cleaning, which doesn’t count. Everyone else has to sit around all day and be quiet. Mom smiles. “Would anyone like dessert?” Oh, God, in whom I do not believe, please don’t let me become my mother!

  “Yes,” I say, less patiently to my customer, but still smiling, “that’s eight different desserts, all fresh not frozen. Would you like me to recite the list again?” Mostly, it’s families at dinner hour. Lots of sticky little kids who have temper tantrums after their second glass of pop and start to throw their food on the floor. Half the job is cleaning. They call it side work: getting the crumbs and the crispy cockroaches out of the toasters, washing the counters, polishing glasses, refilling the Heinz ketchup bottles with some generic red shit that comes in big drums with plastic pumps at the top.

  Steve elbows past Cocoa with disdain, letting the kitchen door swing back in her face. Cocoa readjusts her boa as Steve recites his tight-ass rules: “We have a no loitering policy here; washrooms are only for paying customers. If you would like to be seated, you can leave your name at the hostess stand.” He turns to me: “If you don’t have anything to do, Windex the pie case.”

  The pie cases are a bitch to clean. Throughout the evening, the pies molt millions of electromagnetic crumbs that stick to the mirrored shelves and the sliding glass doors. You have to take out the glass doors and then fit them back into the tricky little oovy-groovy slots that keep them on a track. By the time they fit back into place they’re all smudged up again and some prick has ordered another piece of crumby pie.

  “Nice work,” says John, looking at the clean pie cases. Normally, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about this noblesse oblige shit, but with John, it’s just who he is, not like he’s trying to be some gauche fancy man. John treats everyone with respect. “Are you okay with that table of six?” he asks. He c
omes from old money, and he has a taste for opera and etiquette and for the sorts of men who would always break his heart.

  My dad turned eighteen a few weeks after the Allies declared Victory. He enlisted on his birthday. In Kassel and Dresden and Frankfurt, the stench of bodies greeted the occupying troops. Men in uniform were like my dad, kids who left school to work in mills and munitions factories, or farm boys with big clumsy hands, or teenaged store clerks trying to grow hair on their peach fuzz faces. German bulldozers moved mounds of rotting corpses into mass graves. Some boys passed out. They were there to clean up the rubble and rebuild.

  “The war only ended on paper,” says my dad. “The Allied planes stopped their bombing runs with not much left to knock down. Just the old men and the Hitler Youth were left. ‘Guerrilla armies’ they would call them now, worse than trying to fight real men. The U.S. troops would be too honourable to shoot a child,” he says. “In the time it would take for an American soldier to look into the young boy’s eyes, the kid was going to shoot first.” Dad’s voice gets a little higher, a little less certain. “You don’t know what it’s like to face a child with a gun and know you have to pull the trigger first.” He is unaware that his voice has escalated, that he hasn’t blinked and his eyes look both fierce and watery, like he is on that edge of uncertainty, the wider gate yawning open. I want to ask him if he faced that child, if he pulled the trigger, but this is verboten.

  We hold our breath. The air is combustible. The clock ticks. Then he pauses and breathes and recognizes us all again, as if he has just been away. “That’s why,” he says, “you’re not joining the cadets and you’re not wearing army pants. Young girls in army pants! That belittles the men who gave you freedom. If it weren’t for men in uniform, you would be speaking German now—or worse, Japanese.” I think it might be cool to speak Japanese, and freedom? “What freedom?” I ask under my breath. The Greyhound journey is anti-Odyssean, travelling anywhere to get away from home.

  Wait staff place orders through an intercom that is connected to the kitchen, and our voices boom throughout the restaurant. It’s pretty intimidating to hear your voice carried through the whole big place, and when we get new waiters, they always say “oh shit” the first few times when they’re holding the talk button down. Joyce is from Jamaica. This is her first night. She persistently presses the broadcast button and orders a “large cock.” The kitchen guys whistle encouragingly, and Billy offers her a taste of his cooking. John, deadpan and well manicured, gently suggests that she might try saying “Cola” instead of “Coke.” Steve has little veins that stand out on his neck. “This is unacceptable, Joyce. Wait staff pour their own fountain drinks. We’re not on island time here.” Joyce puts on a browbeaten face, but she sticks up her chin and mutters some rhythmic curse involving the word bumbaclot. She sings it softly, swinging her hips as she walks past Steve.

  I’ve got three dinner plates on my left arm and two on my right. The one higher up on my left arm is sizzling hot, burning the tender crux of skin where the inside of my arm bends. Steve stops me so he can rearrange the garnishes. I clench my teeth and count to ten and give him the evil eye. He has never been a waiter. He just took some community college course on how to boss people around.

  My dad trained for an elite force: Blitz Polizei—the Lightning Police. Their badge had a C for Constabulary with a lightning bolt through it, proclaiming Mobility, Vigilance, Justice! They chose him because he was an eagle-scout, sharpshooter, and state clay-pigeon champion. Lots of guys could shoot nineteen out of twenty clay pigeons, but he was the only one who never missed. The Constabulary was special-ops. Recruits underwent IQ and psychological tests, watched violent propaganda films. “Some guys,” he says, “would have killed a German with their bare hands after seeing those films. Those were the fellows they weeded out, the ones who believed what they saw. Those ones got put on KP; spent their whole tour of duty peeling potatoes. The rest of us got six weeks of German language lessons so we could talk to people there. I don’t remember much now, but ‘HALT’: that’s the same in German and English.” My dad made sergeant in eighteen months. He turned down the job of Chief Detective of the Pittsburgh Police Department when he came home.

  As the kettle whistles for my mom’s tea, my dad finishes the war and immigrates to Canada with my grandfather, leaving the world of Eisenhower, dishwashers, paved suburban driveways, and TV sets. Kids started taking drugs and burning their draft cards. He doesn’t understand the peace movement. There’s really no way of explaining it. He is still in the Lightning Police, spit-polishing his boots, saluting the flag, enlivened at every Sunday dinner by moral outrage. On the rare afternoons when he takes a nap, he tosses and moans, and yells out “HALT” with such anguish that he scares me. Living in the past is not nostalgia, it is shell shock.

  My uniform is thick orange polyester. It might stop a bullet, but is designed only for the front lines of the service industry: they’re restaurant fatigues. An orange-polyester bodice with little puffy sleeves tops off an orange polyester A-line skirt. Ornamental brown buttons grace the front; a zipper fastens up the back. Ribbons of brown rick-rack encircle the edge of the sleeves. Cocoa’s finally got her coffee from the fresh pot. “Girl,” she says, “you is so ugly it looks like you got beaten wit’ an ugly stick.” I try to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirrored pie case. For sure my frizzy hair looks like a lopsided Afro and my freckles stick out against the whiteness of my face. “Not much I can do about it,” I say. “If people have money here it’s for sympathy tips anyway; bourgeois assholes hiding dimes under their plates like it’s some retarded Easter egg hunt.”

  A guy with a comb-over and an outdated plaid suit sits in Stacey-Jane’s section. He says something to her and she starts chewing on her pencil like she’s got to think about it hard. She goes over the menu, a tri-fold laminated behemoth with extra cardboard attachments for seasonal desserts and daily dinner specials paper-clipped to a long tail of pleated cocktail pictures. She’s heading over to me with the menu, trailing leaflets and table-tents. “Do we have something called a blow job?” she asks, “I don’t see it anyplace. Is it like a dessert?” Her voice is so plaintive and musical, like church bells ringing throughout the restaurant. I take a deep breath. Someone in the front suppresses a giggle. Billy yells out, “Come into the kitchen and we’ll help you figure it out, honey.” Cocoa is holding her breath so hard she looks like she’s going to explode but she waits, breathes deeply, relaxes, and then takes a big swig of coffee to get back her equilibrium. “Do you serve blow jobs where you work, Cocoa?” Stacey-Jane asks. Cocoa twists around and sprays her mouth full of coffee across my freshly Windexed pie case and three banquettes.

  She coughs uncontrollably. As she wipes her face with a napkin, she smudges the gold lightning bolt on her cheek and spreads her rouge back toward her ears. I look Stacey-Jane in the eye. “Did that man ask you for a blow job?” I narrow my eyes, trying to make him squirm. He grins back, gesturing toward Stacey-Jane with his hand on his crotch.

  Michael is the campiest waiter. “We get that a lot here,” he says to Stacey-Jane. Billy yells out from the kitchen, “Sure bet you do, Michael.” Michael touches up Cocoa’s makeup while trying to explain the facts of life to Stacey-Jane. Oblivious to the giggles and immune to embarrassment, Stacey-Jane seems to have a magical, impermeable protective coating. “Steve’s the head waiter,” Michael explains. “You can always tell by his dirty knees.” Michael demonstrates, dropping to his knees and sticking out his tongue like a begging dog. Stacey-Jane nods like she’s taking notes for biology class. It is impossible to shock her.

  Then Steve appears out of nowhere like he’s got supersonic ears and ESP. “Since no one here seems to be working, I’m docking everyone’s pay for an extra break.” Cocoa just walks away grinning, which pisses me off. She could have stood up for us and instead she’s writing her name down at the hostess stand. She knows better than that. You have to wait for the hostess to take down your name. Besi
des, she never sits down to eat here. There’s a line forming as she edges past the crowd toward the cold grey Toronto night. I hand her a new takeout coffee and she just leaves, lifting the hem of her gold lamé dress over the threshold.

  The lineup at the hostess stand is out the door, and the hostess is running around seating people. Steve has taken it upon himself to stand at the podium and read out the names. “Mike,” he says. No answer. “Mike. Mike Hunt,” he says firmly. “Mr. Hunt,” he tries again, “Mr. Mike Hunt.” Parents with small children look at each other uncomfortably. The cooks in the kitchen crack up. Steve has no idea why. “MIKE HUNT,” he yells. “MIKE HUNT.” I’m laughing so hard my cheeks hurt and I have to cross my legs to keep from peeing. It’s almost worth the extra side duty. We scrape the crusty bits of dried mustard from the condiment trays and wipe the kid goober off the high chairs and booster seats and polish the utensils before the movie rush. Every once in a while someone giggles for no real reason, just while standing there scraping the relish trays. I’m still giggling when my head hits the pillow.

  The police are chasing me. It’s dark, and I’m wearing my orange-and-brown uniform, except it is too short and I’m not wearing underwear and I keep trying to stretch down my skirt but it keeps riding up and feeling shorter. My section stretches out onto the street and up some stairs. I’m holding plates of fried chicken and there’s the man whose coffee I forgot and the table of six who are yelling at me to take their order but I know if I get closer they’ll grab me. I’m trying to take a plate of green beans to the table, but they’re stuck to the counter. Turning into worms under the heat lamps, they start to wriggle. They stand up and start dancing, and they’re yelling at me, “I CO UK I CO UK,” and I can’t figure out what they’re trying to say, and the heat lamps turn to strobe lights and the restaurant is like the dance floor of Katrina’s with mirror balls and drag queens. Cocoa’s looking at me like I’ve done something wrong. I can feel the shame vines creeping into my throat, sprouting leaves out my nostrils. I run down to the commissary and pull open one of the giant walk-in freezers. I know I’ve killed someone but I don’t remember doing it. I open the freezer door and dead chickens are hanging there upside down with their feathers on, and they start to look at me, giving me the evil eye like I’ve killed them, and I know that I have even though I don’t remember doing it, and a man in a uniform fires a lightning bolt from a gun and I fall like I’m going through a trap door that trips the alarm, and I jerk back awake as I land.