Em Hanson
Take the Heat
Starters
“You want work? This is not easy work.” His gaze cuts from the application up and down me and back. Everything about him is precise, each hair, each thread of his spotless apron.
“I will work hard.” He turned me away earlier, told me not to bother him when he was cooking, to come back only if I found the parking lot empty between lunch and dinner.
I’d left my bike there, leaning against a tree on the edge of the lot, but taken my backpack with my library book and fading bath towel and walked down to the water. I went swimming, I should have waited until after, but it’s so hot in my first tiny apartment with my one small second-hand fan. I look like a child, now, with my hair frizzing as it dries and damp sneakers rubbing my feet raw.
“No experience,” he rattles the application.
The space is so clean it doesn’t seem like a kitchen, except for the wonderful smells which stir a deep hunger, not just to eat the food here, but to learn how to prepare it.
“I just graduated. I want to apply to culinary school, but I need experience.”
“And you want to get that experience here?” He sounds incredulous. “Everyone wants to learn here. What makes you better than everyone? Does not matter, cute, if you know nothing. I have trained great chefs you know.”
I nod, try to meet his eye. The kitchen is silent.
He turns and takes a pan from the oven – perfectly toasted rounds of bread. He places each on a rack, uses a grinder to season them. “This must be done while it’s hot.”
I am learning already.
He gets a prosciutto from a walk-in cooler and cuts tiny paper-thin strips while I wait. “Not too much fat, you want the right amount. You, I think, could use a bit more. No one wants a scrawny cook. What time is it?” He doesn’t look up from his task.
A clock hangs over the door to the dining room. And through the doorway, a perfect world. Every table setting exact. Every dish fine china. Every glass crystal.
“Don’t trust that clock. We don’t need clocks. Great chefs have great timing. We don’t need these things on the wall to tell us what to do. Tell me what time it is, be accurate.” The clock says 2:40, but that doesn’t seem right.
“2:47?”
“Are you asking me if it’s 2:47? Can’t you see I’m busy? The time clock is there by the back door. Tell me what that says.” He keeps cutting, the knife sharp and quick, like it’s moving through water.
The time clock says 2:52. Twelve cards sit in the little pocket slots next to it.
“2:50.” I stand between him and the clock, wondering if he will call my bluff, wondering if he knows.
He looks up. “2:50 it says?”
I nod. “Well, that’s something. That clock is 3 minutes fast.”
Soup and Salad
The water must be hot. Hotter than hot. The dishes waft steam when they come out. The silverware burns my hands as I erase every spot with a soft cloth before putting each away. The glasses must be washed by hand, never more than one in the water at a time.
“Every time, look. Every glass, every cup. Never should be a chip,” he tells me. “You break something – that comes from your pay. And you can’t afford these dishes. Not at what I pay.”
I’ve been two weeks on the dishwasher. I’ve gotten my first paycheck, and it’s not much, but enough for some groceries and a new beach towel to hang out by the water in between my shifts. But today he tells me to stay after I have put all of the dishes away. He does not say why.
He watches me as I put the last few pans away, then leads me to the dining room.
“Now you must find what is wrong. I have put something out of place. Always check the dining room. Every shift.”
The butter knife perched at the wrong angle on the bread plate. A salad fork askew, shying away from its taller companion. The table cloth set so its points hit the chairs instead of falling gracefully between. Each day there is something, some little puzzle. Sometimes he watches me, sometimes he tells me to report back to him.
Maybe sometimes, I find real mistakes, but I doubt it. Someone else is hired for the dishes and I start training to be a busgirl.
“Clear from the right. Never the left. “The left is vulgar. Do you want people to think this is burger barn?” His accent comes out strongly on the word ‘burger,’ as though he hasn’t deigned to learn the correct way to say it. “Maybe we should dump the dishes in a tub like slop for pigs. We are never too busy to be civilized.”
One should go unnoticed, he tells me over and over. I understand unnoticed. My history is a closed social services file. My personal style is erased by the uniform, the rules about how to wear your hair and how short to cut your fingernails.
“You are too thin,” he says when I try on my uniform the first time. “Look – to fit you we need little girl size. Now your legs stick out.” He tugs the hem which falls just below my knee. “Do not distract from the food. I will get fixed for you, longer skirt.”
Finally, as the weather is turning too cold to sit outside between shifts, I am allowed to touch the food before the customers get it. I stay in the afternoons and cut vegetables and refill each sugar caddy with equal numbers of blue, white and pink packets.
I dip the knife in hot water, before slicing the desserts. Each cut. So that it slides through the crust or cream. I whip the cream by hand. Heavy cream, sugar and vanilla, cold metal bowl, whisk.
My arm aches before the cream stiffens. He pauses, a handful of fresh herbs held above a steaming stock.
“You don’t do that before? No boyfriend yet? Well, I guess you will be ready. Strong.” He drops the herbs and stirs and stirs.
Chefs have tempers. Everybody knows that. The best chefs have the worst tempers.
“Where is your temper?” he asks me. “Sometimes I think I see it.”
His anger, when it comes, is only words. They boil over, fast and thickly accented. They evaporate.
I get my new uniform.
“See, I had them make this one with elastic waist for you, with small elastic.”
He has me try each dish, each afternoon, a different plate of food. I must be able to describe each dish before I am allowed to speak to the customers about them. He tells me the words to use.
Entrees
My hands are tough. I still wash the dishes after we have prepped the food each morning. The new dishwasher is studying opera and comes in later. She sings as she works and times the whoosh open of the metal doors with the crescendo of her voice.
I pull the skillet from the rack. He has demanded it – right away. I know it is too hot. I feel it burn even my hardened hands. Before I put it squarely in his.
“These hands are fine instruments.” He curses me. “You should not be so stupid here.”
“Tonight, I give you a Big Table,” he says later. “These are important men. These are men get anything they want. You understand? Anything. You give what they want.”
I do understand and it scares me. I inch forward, into the cool of the dining room. I can’t find my pen for the drink order. Luckily, they want wine, whatever the bartender recommends – she knows what they like. Three bottles to start.
As I neatly cut the foil of the first and apply the corkscrew, one of the men looks up at me.
“Are you even old enough to do that?”
I give the cork and the first taste to the man who has ordered the wine. I pour just enough for the sip and swirl of the connoisseur. “I am doing it aren’t I?” They laugh, a soft chuckle, and stop noticing me.
***
“A knife should have perfect balance.”
His knives are rolled in a cloth with reinforced pockets which he unfurls along the counter while he makes his selection. “Before you pick a knife, you must know what you are going to do with it. Do you want to use the whole blade, do you want to chop or dice or mince? You must know before you pick. None of this chop this then mince that. No. I look at this pepper, I decide what it needs to be perfect for my cooking. Then I select the knife with the absolute balance.”
When he walks too close behind me, I set my knife down on the edge of the counter. He looks over my shoulder at the salads I am making, my arm brushes the knife and it clatters to the floor beside his foot.
My knives hang on a metal strip. Their balance is not perfect.
***
“You think I am old like that clock.”
I am watching the clock on a rare slow night. The minute hand that clicks its way up between the 7 and the 8 and then falls again, down to the 6. The hour hand continues around the clock. One hand unaware of the other.
He laughs. “Don’t worry, I am not that old yet. That clock reminds me Carpe Diem. Who knows when his time will come? Or not, right?”
***
“This they say is undercooked?”
He tastes the food, I notice, each time something is sent back, before throwing it away and starting again. He always finds the customer, not the food, lacking.
“They do not know how to eat tuna. They eat tuna from a can and come to my place think they will have can fish. Ignorant.” He takes a big bite. “This is perfection.”
I don’t carry poison in my apron pocket. But I think about it.
I keep small vials of spices instead, timidly apply them. He would notice if these finishing touches ever came back to the kitchen. He would be livid. But so far, they don’t.
Desserts
It is late, the other servers are gone.
I have stayed to wrap the desserts, to make the sauces for the next day. I have at least $300 dollars folded in my apron pocket which I wrap up and stuff in my backpack. Without even looking, I find my time card and place it in the slot where the blue numbers appear. 11:40.
He is right there when I turn.
He says something about my skirt being dirty. He stands between me and the door.
Of course, I’ll have it clean by tomorrow, when I get here to open. I wait for him to move.
But instead he grabs the front of the skirt, pulls it, stretching it way from my body and looks, hungrily, inside. “You should always be clean. Like I am.”
I grab at the material that stretches between us, but he has let go, and I feel the elastic sting my stomach. He walks out, reminding me to lock the door behind me.
I don’t dare turn on the light, but I know this dining room by heart. I feel the handles of the coffee cups nudged out of unison, the rims of crystal glasses where I trust the sun will find my dirty fingerprints in the morning. The poses of each piece of silverware. The fold of each napkin. The placement of each vase waiting to be filled when the florist arrives in the morning. It is not hard to find them in the dark. I lock the door behind me.
It feels like a dream the next morning until I see him sitting on the porch. The opera singing dishwasher crouched beside him. He is breathing rapidly into a common paper bag. I edge closer and closer, until I can hear the crinkle and sizzle of the bag as it expands and contracts. His breathing sets a violent rhythm.
“Do you want me to call someone?” the dishwasher is asking him.
Who would she call? His shirt is wet, there are flower petals on one hand.
“Should I open the restaurant?” I ask her.
She looks up at me lost, like I’m the one who is supposed to know the answer.
Inside I start some coffee. The smell of it wakes me. I go to see what I have done. Step over the tray of flowers which has crashed from his hands. See what he saw, what the dishwasher, maybe, hasn’t even noticed. Such tiny acts of disarray.
“He wants to talk to you,” she says.
I drink my coffee slowly from the good china. And then I open the door. I hadn’t noticed how wonderfully crisp the morning was. I take a deep breath of it.
He is standing now. Looking out toward the water.
“I see it now, your temper. You found it. I think you are a chef, after all. But not here, you know.”
I know.
END
***
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Em Hanson (pen name) lives in Narragansett, Rhode Island. She has been published in Eternal as a Weed: Tales of Ozark experience, The Write Launch, and as a winner in the Providence Journal's COVID fiction contest. Other than an undergraduate degree in English (and another in Human Development Social Relations to get a real job) she has honed her writing through page after page of practice and several creative writing groups.