Just One Day (19 page)

“I don’t think your lab would want me anymore, given that I’ve dropped most of my
science courses and am going to drop the rest of them come fall,” I say, spite dripping
from my voice. “See, I’m not pre-med anymore. So sorry to
disappoint
you.”

My sarcasm hangs in the humid air—and then, like a vapor, it floats away as I realize
that, for the first time in my life, I’m
not
sorry to disappoint her. Maybe it’s the spite talking, or maybe Grandma’s secret
wine, but I’m almost glad of it. I’m so tired of avoiding the unavoidable, because
I feel like I’ve been disappointing her for such a long time.

“You’ve dropped pre-med?” Her voice is quiet, that lethal mix of fury and woundedness
that could always take me down like a bullet to the heart.

“That was always
your
dream, Ellie,” Grandma says, shielding me. She turns to me. “You still haven’t answered
my question, Ally. What are
you
doing this summer?”

Mom is looking so fragile and so angry, and I feel my will starting to break, feel
myself starting to give in. But then I hear a voice—my voice—announcing this:

“I’m going back to Paris.”

It comes out, as if the idea were fully formed, something plotted for months, when
in fact, it just slipped out, the same way all those admissions to Willem did. But
when it does, I feel a thousand pounds lighter, my anger now fully dissipated, replaced
by exhilaration flowing through me like sunlight and air.

This
is how I felt that day in Paris with Willem. And
this
is how I know that it’s the right thing to do.

“Also, I’m learning French,” I add. And for some reason, this announcement makes the
table erupt into pandemonium. Mom starts screaming at me about lying to her and throwing
my whole future away. Dad is yelling about switching majors and who’s going to pay
for my exchange program to Paris. Grandma is yelling at Mom for ruining yet another
Seder.

So with all the commotion, it’s a little strange that anyone can hear Phil, who has
barely said a word since the soup, when he pipes up, “
Back
to Paris, Ally? I thought Helen said your trip to Paris got canceled because they
were striking.” He shakes his head. “They always seem to be striking over there.”

The table goes silent. Phil picks up a piece of matzo and starts munching on it. Mom,
Dad, and Grandma all stare at me.

I could so easily cover this up. Phil’s hearing aid was turned down. He heard wrong.
I could say that I want to go
to
Paris because I never made it there on the last trip. I’ve told so many lies. What’s
one more?

But I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to cover up. I don’t want to pretend anymore.
Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I
had never been more honest in my life.

Maybe that’s the thing with liberation. It comes at a price. Forty years wandering
through the desert. Or incurring the wrath of two very pissed-off parents.

I take a breath. I brave up.

“
Back
to Paris,” I say.

Twenty-six

MAY

Home

I
make a new list.

• Airfare to Paris: $1200
  
• French class at community college: $400
  
• Spending money for two weeks in Europe: $1000.
  

All together that’s $2,600. That’s how much money I’ll need to save to get to Europe.
Mom and Dad are not helping with the trip, obviously, and they’re refusing to let
me use any of the money in my savings account, from gifts through the years, because
that’s supposed to be for educational purposes, and they’re the trustees on the account,
so I can’t argue. Besides, it’s only through Grandma’s intervention, coupled with
my threat to go live at Dee’s for the summer that Mom has even agreed to let me live
at home. She’s that mad. She’s that mad without even knowing the entire story. I told
them I went to Paris. I didn’t tell them why. Or with whom. Or why I need to go back,
except that I left something important there—they think it’s the suitcase.

I’m not sure what infuriates her more. Last summer’s deceit or the fact that I won’t
tell her everything about it. She refused to speak to me after the Seder and then
four weeks went by with barely a word from her. Now that I’m back home for the start
of the summer she basically avoids me. Which is both a relief and also kind of scary,
because she’s never done anything like this before.

Dee says that twenty-six hundred dollars is a lot for two months, but not impossible.
He suggests skipping the French class. But I feel like I need to do that. I’ve always
wanted to learn French. And I’m not going back to Paris—not facing down Céline—without
it.

So, twenty-six hundred bucks. Doable. If I get a job. But the thing is, I’ve never
had a job before. Nothing remotely job-like, beyond babysitting and filing at Dad’s
office, which hardly fills the spiffy new résumé that I’ve printed on beautiful card
stock. Maybe this explains why, after dropping it off at every business in town with
a job opening, I get zero response.

I decide to sell my clock collection. I take them to an antique dealer in Philadelphia.
He offers me five hundred bucks for the lot. I’ve easily spent double that on the
clocks over the years, but he just looks at me and says that maybe I’ll do better
on eBay. But that would take months, and I just want to be rid of them. So I hand
over the clocks, except for a Betty Boop one, which I send to Dee.

When Mom finds out what I’ve done, she shakes her head with such profound disgust,
like I have just sold my body, not my clocks. The disapproval intensifies. It wafts
through the house like a radiation cloud. Nowhere is safe to hide.

I
have
to get a job. Not just to earn the money but to get out of this house. Escaping to
Melanie’s isn’t an option. Number one, we’re not speaking, and number two, she’s at
a music program in Maine for the first half of summer—this according to my dad.

“You just gotta keep trying,�� Dee advises when I call him for job advice from our
landline. As part of my punishment, my cell phone has been turned off, and the family
Internet password protected, so I have to ask them to log me onto the web or else
go to the library. “Drop your résumé at every business in town, not just the ones
saying they’re hiring, ’cause usually places that are desperate enough to hire someone
like you don’t have time to advertise.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You want a job? Swallow your pride. And drop off a résumé everywhere.”

“Even the car wash?” I joke.

“Yeah. Even the car wash.” Dee isn’t kidding. “And ask to speak to the manager of
the car wash and treat him like the King of All Car Washes.”

I imagine myself scrubbing hubcaps. But then I think of Dee, working in a pillow factory
this summer or hosing off dishes in the dining hall. He does what he has to do. So
the next day, I print out fifty new résumés and just go door to door, from bookstore
to sewing shop to grocery store, CPA firm to the liquor store to, yes, the car wash.
I don’t just drop my résumé. I ask to speak to managers. Sometimes the managers come
out. They ask me about my experience. They ask me how long I want to be employed for.
I listen to my own answers: No real job experience to speak of. Two months. I get
why nobody’s hiring me.

I’m almost out of résumés when I pass by Café Finlay. It’s a small restaurant on the
edge of town, all done up in 1950s décor, with black-and-white-checked floors and
a mishmash of Formica tables. Every other time I’ve gone past, it seemed to be closed.

But today music is blasting from inside so loud the windows are vibrating. I push
the door, and it nudges open. I shout “hello.” No one replies. The chairs are all
stacked up on the tables. There’s a pile of fresh linens on one of the booths. Yesterday’s
specials are scrawled on a chalkboard on the wall. Things like halibut with an orange
tequila jalapeño beurre blanc with kiwi fruit. Mom calls the food here “eclectic,”
her code for weird, which is why we’ve never eaten here. I don’t know anyone who eats
here.

“You here with the bread?”

I spin around. There’s a woman, Amazon tall and just as broad, with wild red hair
poking out from under a blue bandanna.

“No,” I say.

“Mother
fucker
!” She shakes her head. “What do you want?” I hold out a résumé. She waves it away.
“Ever work in a kitchen?” I shake my head.

“Sorry. No,” she says.

She looks at the Marilyn Monroe wall clock. “I’m going to kill you, Jonas!” She shakes
her fist at the door.

I turn to leave, but then I stop. “What’s the bread order?” I ask. “I’ll run and get
it for you.”

She glances at the clock again and sighs dramatically. “Grimaldi’s. I need eighteen
French baguettes, six loaves of the Harvest. And a couple of day-old brioche. You
got that?”

“I think so.”

“
Think so
’s not gonna butter the bread, honey.”

“Eighteen baguettes. Six loaves of Harvest and a couple of day-old brioche.”

“Make sure it’s
stale
brioche. Can’t make bread pudding with fresh bread. And ask for Jonas. Tell him it’s
for Babs and tell him he can throw in the brioche for free and knock twenty percent
off the rest because his damn delivery guy was a no-show again. Also, make sure I
don’t get any sourdough. I hate that shit.”

She grabs a wad of cash from the vintage register. I take it from her and sprint to
the bakery as fast as I can, get Jonas, bark the order, and run back with it, which
is harder than it sounds, carrying thirty loaves of bread.

I pant as Babs looks over the bread order. “You know how to wash dishes?”

I nod. That much I can do.

She shakes her head in resignation. “Go to the back and ask Nathaniel to introduce
you to Hobart.”

“Hobart?”

“Yep. You two’ll be getting intimate.”

Hobart turns out to be the name of the industrial dish washer, and once the restaurant
opens, I spend hours with it, rinsing dishes with a giant hose, loading them in Hobart,
unloading them while they’re still scalding hot and repeating the whole enterprise.
By some miracle, I manage to stay on top of the never-ending flow of dishes and not
drop anything or burn my fingers too badly. When there’s a lull, Babs orders me to
cut bread or whip cream by hand (she insists it tastes better that way) or mop the
floor or find the tenderloins from one of the walk-in coolers. I spend the night in
an adrenaline panic, thinking I’m about to screw up.

Nathaniel, the prep cook, helps me as much as he can, telling me where things are,
helping me scrub sauté pans when I get too slammed. “Just wait till the weekend,”
he warns.

“I thought no one ever ate here.” I put my hand over my mouth, instinctually knowing
Babs would be mad to hear that.

But Nathaniel just laughs. “Are you kidding? Babs is worshipped by the Philadelphia
foodies. They make the trek out here just for her. She’d make way more money if she
moved to Philly, but she says her dogs would hate it in the city. And by dogs, I think
she means us.”

When the last of the diners leave, the kitchen staff and the waiters seem to all exhale
at once. Someone blasts some old Rolling Stones. A bunch of tables are pushed together
and everyone sits down. It’s well past midnight, and I have a long walk home. I start
to pack up my things, but Nathaniel motions for me to join them. I sit at the table,
feeling shy even though I’ve been bumping hips with these people all night.

“You want a beer?” he asks. “We have to pay for them, but only cost.”

“Or you can have some of the reject wine the distributors bring by,” a waitress named
Gillian says.

“I’ll take some wine.”

“It looks like someone died on you,” says one of the waiters. I look down. My nice
skirt and top—my good job- hunting outfit—are covered in sauces that look vaguely
like bodily fluids.

“I feel like I’m the one who died,” I say. I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired.
My muscles ache. My hands are red from the near-scalding water. And my feet? Don’t
get me started.

Gillian laughs. “Spoken like a true kitchen slave.”

Babs appears with the big bowls of steaming pasta and small chunks of leftover fish
and steak. My stomach lets out a gurgle. The platters get passed around. I don’t know
if her cooking is “eclectic,” but the food is amazing, the orange tequila jalapeño
sauce is only faintly orange, and it’s smoky rather than spicy. I clear my plate,
and then sop up any remaining sauce with a hunk of Jonas’s not-sourdough bread.

“So?” Babs asks me when I’ve finished.

All eyes turn to me. “It’s the second best meal I’ve ever had,” I say. Which is the
truth.

Everyone else oohs, like I’ve just insulted Babs. But she just smirks. “I’ll bet your
first best was with a lover,” she says, and I go as red as her hair.

Babs instructs me to return the next day at five, and the routine starts all over
again. I work harder than I ever have, eat an amazing meal, and pour myself into bed.
I have no idea if I’m filling in for someone or maybe being auditioned. Babs screams
at me constantly, for using soap on her cast-iron sauté pan or not getting the lipstick
off the coffee cups before they go into Hobart or making the whipped cream too stiff
or not stiff enough or not adding the exact right amount of vanilla extract. But by
the fourth night, I’m learning not to take it so personally.

On the fifth night, before the dinner rush, Babs calls me to the back near the walk-in
refrigerator. She’s sucking on a bottle of vodka, which is what she does before the
rush begins. Her lipstick leaves smudges on the rim. For a second, I think this is
it, that she’s going to fire me. But instead she hands me a sheaf of documents.

“Tax forms,” she explains. “I pay minimum wage, but you’ll get tips. Which reminds
me. You keep forgetting to collect yours.” She reaches under the counter for an envelope
with my name on it.

I open up the envelope. There’s a wad of cash in there. Easily a hundred dollars.
“This is
mine
?”

She nods. “We pool tips. Everyone gets a cut.”

I run my fingers over the money. The bills snag on my ragged hangnails. My hands are
beyond thrashed, but I don’t care because they’re thrashed from my job. Which has
earned me this money. I feel something well up inside me that has nothing to do with
airplane tickets or Paris trips or money at all, really.

“It’ll go up in the fall,” Babs says. “Summer’s our slow season.”

I hesitate. “That’s great. Except I won’t be here in the fall.”

She wrinkles her red brows. “But I just broke you in.”

I feel bad, guilty, but it was right there on my résumé, the first line—Objective:
To obtain short-term employment. Of course, Babs never read my résumé.

“I go to college,” I explain.

“We’ll work around your schedule. Gillian’s a student too. And Nathaniel, on and off.”

“In Boston.”

“Oh.” She pauses. “Oh, well. I think Gordon’s coming back after Labor Day.”

“I’m hoping to leave by the end of July. But only if I can save two thousand dollars
by then.” And as I say it, I do the math. More than a hundred bucks a week in tips,
plus wages—I actually might be able to pull it off.

“Saving for a car?” she asks absentmindedly. She takes another swig of her vodka.
“You can buy mine. That beast’ll be the death of me.” Babs drives an ancient Thunderbird.

“No. I’m saving for Paris.”

She puts her bottle down. “Paris?”

I nod.

“What’s in Paris?”

I look at her. I think of him for the first time in a while. In the craziness of the
kitchen, he became a little abstract. “Answers.”

She shakes her head with such vehemence her auburn curls come loose from her bandanna.
“You can’t go to Paris looking for answers. You have to go looking for questions—or,
at the very least, macarons.”

“Macaroons? The coconut things?” I think of the gross cookie replacements we eat on
Passover.

“Not macar
oons
. Macar
ons
. They’re meringue cookies in pastel colors. They are edible angel’s kisses.” She
looks at me. “You need two thousand bucks by when?”

“August.”

She narrows her eyes at me. They’re always a little bit bloodshot, though, oddly,
more so at the beginning of a shift than at the end, when they take on a sort of manic
gleam. “I’ll make you a deal. If you don’t mind working some doubles for weekend brunch,
I’ll make sure you earn your two grand by July twenty-fifth, which is when I close
the restaurant for two weeks for
my
summer vacation. On one condition.”

“Which is?”

“Every day in Paris, you eat a macaron. They have to be fresh, so no buying a pack
and eating one a day.” She stops and closes her eyes. “I ate my first macaron in Paris
on my honeymoon. I’m divorced now, but some loves are enduring. Especially if they
happen in Paris.”

A tiny chill prickles up my neck. “Do you really believe that?” I ask her.