She was showing me how to do Crow, a yoga pose. We were in the kitchen and we knew our customers were waiting. But it was New Year’s Eve and we’d been drinking and midnight had come and gone. She had a lit cigarette hanging from her lips and smoke twisted in front of her face. I leaned against the metal sink, where hot water was gushing over a package of frozen shrimp.
Evan and Shek had already gone into the walk-in to get high. I glanced at the door at the other end of the kitchen, smelling cigarette smoke and also traces of weed. I wondered who the hell was out taking care of the customers if all the waitstaff was in the kitchen, getting high and doing yoga.
Most of the customers had been there all night though, so it didn’t matter. They were camped out, taking shots of tequila and drinking free champagne. It was a relief when your customers were in good moods and mostly drunk. They cared less about the service.
Still, the kitchen was a funny place to be doing yoga. Mice were always darting about, for one thing. Then there was the rack of glassware, most of which was never clean because our industrial-strength dishwasher wasn’t strong enough to get off nacho cheese and blotches of chili. Lisa was tilting forward next to a row of cardboard boxes full of white onions. Next to that was a bucket of dirty rags.I had always admired Lisa. At the beginning, there had been some tension because she’d spoken behind my back and told the other waitresses that I was lazy. I had just started working there and had trouble remembering the differences between all the frozen drinks. I hadn’t thought I was lazy. I worked as hard as I could, as hard as anyone.
The owner pulled me aside one afternoon. The others are saying you’re lazy, she said. Why? I said. What am I doing wrong? I don’t know, the owner said. It’s just what they’re saying. Who is saying this? I asked. I’d rather not say, she said. Come on, I said. All right, she said. It was Lisa and some others. You’d better shape up. Okay, I said.
I confronted Lisa and then she felt bad. She apologized so much that I felt like the guilty one. Now I wanted to move past this thing, but I wasn’t sure that was possible. She’d hurt me and then I’d embarrassed her and when we looked at each other, the present was nothing but a thin, transparent sheet floating over the past.
Still, if I took my feelings out of the equation, I liked her. She was thin and wore black pumas with stripes along the sides. She was always drinking at work and making us laugh. She was the only one of us who was married. Her husband was a scientist and in a few months they would be moving to Switzerland. She behaved like her childhood was on the brink of ending, and she wanted to have as much fun as she could before it did. That was how we all felt, like waiting tables was some layover from childhood to adulthood. But for most of us, there was no clear entry to adulthood in sight.
Her hands were pressing down on the watery, slimy rubber mat. The orange ember of her cigarette flashed, brightened, then dimmed. To her left were rows of cleaning fluid—bleach, soap, and some gritty liquid whose bottle label was in Spanish. Behind that was another sink where at night, when we were feeling tired, we would spill out the contents of the slush bucket instead of carrying it through the restaurant and into the ice room like we were supposed to.
The walk-in door opened. I glimpsed metal shelves with containers of lettuce, chopped carrots, pasta noodles, whipped cream, butter pads. Evan emerged looking stoned, his eyelids low and his lips in a little smile. Behind him, Shek held up the green apple they’d used as their pipe, its little hole black from smoke. He winked at me.
“What are you doing?” Evan asked. His sneakers made impressions on the rubber mat as he stood over Lisa, who was still struggling to balance on her hands.
“Crow pose,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s yoga,” she said. She plopped onto her thigh, then tumbled onto her hip, laughing. “It’s healthy.”
It was disgusting where she was sitting. The water from the dishwasher dripped down and wet the floor. A clump of wet, soggy nacho chips sat beside her hand. She lolled her head back.
I wished I could be like her. Not drunk, because already I was that. But ridiculous and unafraid. I wished she hadn’t hurt my feelings that time. I wished she and I could move past that, though probably it was all just in my head anyway. I wished she would stop working here and move to Europe, because I wanted to believe that there was hope for us, that this wasn’t the last stop, that you really could re-enter society in a decent way after waiting tables in a place like this.
She lifted her hands toward me. She had food stuck to her palms. She laughed and wiped her palms along her jeans, then used her thumb and index finger to pull her cigarette out of her mouth.
“I love yoga,” she said.
Evan said, “Shek has some—” He touched his finger to his nose, indicating coke. “You want some?”
“Yeah,” Lisa said, and stood up, using the dishwasher to support herself.
Together, the three of them went back into the walk-in. I felt lonely for some reason I couldn’t understand, and I turned around and went back out to wait on our customers.
Becky Tuch has won several awards for her fiction (from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine and The Tennessee Writer’s Alliance) and received Honorable Mentions from the 2008 Pushcart Prize Anthology and Writers’ Journal. She has published stories, poetry and art and reviews in numerous publications including Blueline, Eclipse, Folio, The Connecticut River Review, Artsmedia and The Women’s Review of Books. She is also the founding editor of TheReviewReview.net, a website which reviews literary magazines and offers publishing tips to writers. Her website and commitment to the writing life were featured in The Somerville News in the winter of 2009. She teaches fiction to kids, teens and adults throughout Boston.
Good job, Becky, very much enjoyed this.