2nd
The Cook and The Change
Three years ago I didn’t have a girl in the war. I sweat for myself and felt complete. It was hard finding work and it had nothing to do with the economy. I was washing dishes at a small restaurant, walking home from work with open cuts from the sharp edges of industrial pans. These cuts never really closed on account of the strong sterilizer we used in the rinse. The upper layers of my finger nails had begun peeling. At the end of the night, when I was lightheaded from the fumes of floor soap and ammonia, I walked home feeling that I deserved a place to sleep, sweat through a t-shirt while brown leaves clung to my jeans in the night autumn wind. There is no gait like that of a man who has sated his appetite for work.
It was early October and I was walking under streetlights down the hill towards my street. The grill had closed two hours early and the time was not yet eleven. My skin was still sore from the hot dishwater from twenty-five minutes before. Behind me, sprinkling pepper on a steak and listening to a receiver held to her ear by a shoulder, the head cook was whispering. But she wasn’t whispering so much as she was choking on the air leaving her throat. Its contractions were lagging behind the rest of the vocal process and the final product was a cymbal crash without the initial crash. I was trying to decipher what she was saying but could only get the common words such as ‘the’ ‘why’ ‘my’ ‘him.’ Just as I thought she was speaking up, while I watched a waiter dump a handful of dirty silverware into a bucket, three important events occurred: I clearly heard Sherri say “loved” into the telephone, the receiver slipped from her shoulder, and in an effort to catch it she swiped the finished steak in front of her onto the floor. The ceramic plate didn’t break when it first hit the floor. Instead it bounced from its rim, spun 180 degrees on a tilt and landed face down in twenty pieces or so. The steak must have somehow held the plate together just long enough to give the impression that it wasn’t actually going to break. Immediately, I froze, slapped out of my bath-like ease, and watched a woman who, much like the plate, had until then appeared unbreakable, fall to unrecognizable pieces. Instead of her Polish curses, Sherri shook with an almost indetectable moan. Her body paralyzed in sobs and there was an uncomfortable delay between my confusion and feelings of concern. It was one of those moments that’s not meant for any witnesses. Unfortunately, by some chance of fate, I had no escape but to watch this coarse stone erode. Sherri was leaning down, halfway bent to the floor, holding the edge of the cool steel counter with her left hand. Her ferocious sobs were turning her to sand.
My emotions tapped out briefly. The sudden contradiction smashed my schemas like two school-buses colliding. It is during that moment, when the grills finally meet, dozens of children who have yet to be given a real lecture on death screaming, the bus driver’s eyes squinted shut and the image of her husband that God isn’t sure what to do with the pieces; he isn’t sure where to put the six year old girl in the seat furthest back who was physically propelled upwards, or the giant sliver of glass spinning at neck-height from the back, or the billions of specks of glass and metal and paint and skin and blood. Caught off guard, he is forced to make a billion instantaneous desicions. More often than not, in his haste, he makes the wrong ones.
I had always held certain empathetic feelings for Sherri that were overlooked by most. When I started at the restaurant, I was warned about her fits of anger and impatience. It was explained to me that there has yet to be a dishwasher who hasn’t gotten into at least two verbal arguments with her in their first week. I expected a woman carved from limestone, eyes sunken and dark, filled with judgments that made the God of Judaism seem far too forgiving. But on my first day, I met a plain woman in her late fifties. Her hair held little color and had been brushed quickly, if at all. Her skin was exhausted and the sags below her eyes extended to the center of her cheeks. While cell cried fatigue there was a hint of life in everything about her. The stains in her shirt, the sagging flesh overlapping her elbows, the wrinkles and countless imperfections across the skin of her face all aided to invoke an unconscious awe to anyone who cared to look. Before me was everything a human being aspires to be. She embodied the walk home at the end of a hard-day’s work. Somewhere within the scarred, marked, and lazy skin her eyes were soft and overwhelmingly accepting.
Sherri was born in south Boston, created by two people who were never intended to reproduce. Her father, Jed, which was short for Josephonie, drank a half gallon of Skyy vodka every day and sang the theme songs to shows like Love Boat and Lassie. He started belting showtunes after he had been fired. Forced to stay at home with Sherri, it was these high pitched wailings that could help him ignore the screaming baby. By some miracle he was never physically abusive to either Sherri or her mother. However, along with his teddy-bear fists came a serpent’s tongue. He worked construction on the docks and spoke like most of the sailors he met. Sherry was reminded daily of all the many reasons that the world considered her useless and ugly. At first, She excelled at school, trying to become a classroom star to spite him and to convince herself that what he had taught her since she could first comprehend the words ‘stupid,’ ‘useless,’ and ‘wretched’ was all entirely or even partially untrue. Unfortunately, his tongue proved much stronger than her spite and when she couldn’t take her home, she dropped out of school, washing dishes to pay for an apartment in East Boston.
The woman I met, who cursed and rarely smiled, who verbally tore a person to pieces if he were to cross her path, had constructed an incredible wall that made her strong but irritable. The wall was ten layers of brick, each layer built to cover the graffiti on the previous one. Words like “cunt” and “useless” and “ugly” and “stupid” were hastily painted in white spray paint. Unable to paint over these marks, Sherri was forced to build another wall, not so much to strengthen its defense but to hide the one before. People often speak of breaking down these walls but never consider where these bricks might go. Those who can get through the walls are left with heaps of broken bricks and a landscape that is practically unwalkable. But there is always a hole they use to see through. And if you could cross the moat of insults, crawl under the barbed wire tongue, and traverse the flat desert, you could start to see those holes. If the tearing wind of fear and loneliness failed to brush you aside you could place your hands on the cool surface of her wall and put your own eyes to this quarter-sized hole. If you waited, and if you wanted it enough, you could see the Sherry God created: a beautiful woman with the inability to judge another human being. In tattered muddy rags, balled in the corner, hugging her knees, greasy long brown hair over her blackened face, a frail and skinny woman hid in her brick cube. And if you waited even longer she’d eventually look up, and you’d see that she was smiling.
When she crashed and that entire defense was swept up into a freak tornado, neither I nor the waiter beside me knew what to do. We looked at each other, stiffening our lower lip down and clenching our teeth. We were saved before we could make the situation any worse by the owner of the restaurant, who was entering the building from the back door, carrying some large boxes labeled Cisco. Immediately, he handed the boxes to me and I was temporarily blinded by the stack that stretched beyond my forehead. There wasn’t room to move or a surface to unload the boxes to, so I stood in front of the sink, holding four boxes of ice-berg lettuce, unable to see, dish-water running to my elbows.
It was rare to hear Sherri speak about her husband. Sometimes it was easy to forget she was married as she kept everyone at an aeon’s distance. But, I know she loved her husband. It became all to evident when his heart attack was enough to level her entire battlefield in a second. The owner guided the shaking stranger to the hospital and I dropped the boxes of lettuce.
——
The blues of boredom were not an uncommon feeling with a workless Monday afternoon. But this particular Monday brought a slightly darker blue. Caffeine was always enough to give me an hours worth of motivation at least, the falsified chemical drive to do something productive, before the true lull began. That morning, that artifial energy and alertness came, but with it no drive. At the time, I just attributed it to a bout of melancholy, correlated with nothing but a momentary biochemical backup somewhere in the center of my brain. I spent that afternoon on the couch, watching the television attempt to entertain me.
Every aspect of my life from that day on can be entirely attributed to the gray/green digital display on a white box revealing a caller’s identification. I had no answering machine; I never saw the point in leaving messages. Any other day, that ring would have gone unanswered. Instinctively, I glanced at the tiny screen. The call was from an area code foreign to me. Those three digits changed my life, providing me with the curiosity required for the first motivational force. I lifted the handset from its cradle, slowly bringing it to my ear, and had just enough motivation left to mutter,
“Hello?”
“Hey, is this Doug?” The voice sounded pink, small, vulnerable, warm.
“Yeah…” I coughed, “who’s this?” I thought it might be a girl I had given my number too some weeks back while at work. She was young. Her black eye shadow and tight skirt screamed “I hate my fucking father.” It was my achille’s heel and I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to bring home a dish-washer, sweaty, filthy, and completely unreliable. What a catch. I can see your seventeen-year-old soul and its wet tissue paper. Let me destroy you.
“Hey, this is Eva… Sean’s friend… you know, from last night?” Melancholy: what a line of bullshit. At that moment I was so lost I wanted to drop the phone and run.
“Hey, uh…. How’s it going?”
“I’m oka-aay” God, her voice was so fucking cute. She wasn’t okay but oka-aay, the a suspended before completion just a bit longer than expected. “I hope it’s not really weird that I’m calling, but I tried to get Sean to call, but he’s being an asshole and doesn’t want to talk while driving.”
“Nah, It’s good to hear from you. What’s up?”
“Cool… well anyway, we’re going to some place called Bison House or something…”
“Bison Grill.” Sean said, just audible in the background. I heard a horn.
“Yeah, Bison Grill. Sean wants to know if you want us to pick you up.”
Sean spoke under his breath. It wasn’t meant to be heard and how the cellular phone was able to pick up his voice and transmit it is a mystery. I shouldn’t have been able to hear him say,
“Yes, Sean wants to know.”
“Yeah that sounds cool… I’m just doin some work at home… you guys don’t mind picking me up?”
“No, we’re like… um… five minutes from your house, I think… we’re on um….” A long enough pause for my heart to miss three whole beats, “Mood Street. That’s close… right?”
“We’re not on Mood street, Jesus, just tell him I’m turning onto Chestnut now.” Sean again. I shouldn’t have been able to hear her give him the finger.
“Did you hear that?”
I gave a dry laugh, “yeah, I heard him. I’ll be down in a second.”
“kayy… cool… see you in a bit.”
I didn’t hang up. I waited for her end to click. It didn’t click right away, and seconds later she laughed uncomfortably, ‘okay bye’ and the call ended. The sheet, the childhood nightmares, the blues, the anhedonia that was quickly subsiding, spinning around a freshly dug hole I that I had never seen before. I had been completely baited by love at first sight. It had filled my subconscious with such stealth because I was wholly misinformed about the meaning of that term. I felt that truth deep within the soft tissue center of my bones. Being in Eva’s presence, even with such limited direct interaction or visual stimulation, had irreparably changed me. There was a hole so ancient and unfulfilled that I had grown to live comfortably with its presence. But the unconscious recognition of someone I was meant to love, two lives finally connecting, hiding its true purpose until the time was right, somehow filled that hole for the first time in my life. But it was a transative fix and the hole was once again unearthed when we parted. That morning, I was feeling that hole for the first time since I entered the world from my mother’s protective arms. It didn’t depend on aesthetic beauty, physical attraction, hormonal release, or the matching of two perfectly compatible personalities. Rather, it was simply the distance between us. Like two magnets unaffected until you bring them close together; indistinguishable from any other rock when apart. When our lives overlapped, briefly, carelessly, and on such a shallow level, it was as if she had curled into the fetal position, sliding comfortably into that egg-shaped hole causing something ancient in me to wake. It cracked and threatened to disintegrate as it became animated, but was eventually standing on its own. But it was unable to stand long, having not used its muscles for a lifetime. As the dusty, cobwebbed creature love stumbled back to its knees, unable to support its own weight any longer, I realized that there really was a colossal crater in my heart. Her lack of presence was felt in every fiber of motivation and joy. I had been forever altered by love at first sight.
