Mira was nearing the intersection. The girls started to move toward their car, still giggling and watching, but she didn’t notice them. She only saw me.
“Colie!” she called, waving one hand wildly, as if there was any way I could have missed her. “Over here!”
I could feel the girls looking at me, and my face began to burn. I lifted one hand, just barely, and wished the parking lot would open up and suck me in.
“I’m going to the market to buy some more biscuit dough!” she screamed as a big truck rumbled by. “You want anything?!”
I managed to shake my head.
“Okay!” she yelled, flashing me a thumbs-up. “I’ll see you later, then!” And with that, she started out into traffic, pedaling slowly at first, dodging the occasional pothole, and then coasting down the hill toward the rest of town.
As Mira passed, the road began to dip and she started picking up speed, the wheel spokes blurring. People in cars were watching her, the day-tripper girls, tourists at the gas station, everyone, even me. We all stared as her hair began to stream behind her again, a reflector on the back of the bike catching the sunlight and sparkling before she took the next curve and disappeared.
“Mayonnaise,” Morgan said, “is a lot like men.”
It was nine-thirty in the morning on my first day of work, but I’d been up since six. I kept thinking Morgan would forget me or change her mind but at nine-fifteen she pulled up in front of Mira’s steps and beeped her horn, just as we’d planned.
The restaurant was empty except for us and the radio, tuned to an oldies station. “Twisting the Night Away” was playing, and we were making salad dressing, both of us up to our elbows in thick, smelly mayonnaise.
“It can,” she went on, plopping another scoop into the bowl, “make everything much better, adding flavor and ease to your life. Or, it can just be sticky and gross and make you nauseous.”
I smiled, stirring my mayonnaise while I considered this. “I hate mayonnaise.”
“You’ll probably hate men too, from time to time,” she said. “At least mayonnaise you can avoid.”
This was the way Morgan taught. Not in instructions, but pronouncements. Everything was a lesson.
“Lettuce,” she announced later, pulling a head out of the plastic bag in front of us, “should be leafy, not slimy. And no black or brown edges. We use lettuce on everything: garnish, salads, burgers. A bad piece of lettuce can ruin your whole day.”
“Right,” I said.
“Chop it like this,” she instructed, taking a few whacks with a knife before handing it to me. “Big chops, but not too big.”
I chopped. She watched. “Good,” she said, reaching over to adjust my chops just a bit. I went on. “Very good.”
Morgan was this meticulous about everything. Preparing dressings was a ritual, every measurement carefully checked. Isabel, on the other hand, dumped it all in at once, knocked a spoon around, and came up with the same results, dipping in a finger and licking it to double-check.
But Morgan had her own way.
“Peel carrots away from you,” she said, demonstrating, “and cut off the ends about a quarter inch each. When feeding them into the processor, pause about every five seconds. It gives a finer shred.”
I peeled, chopped, and stocked. I learned the perfect, symmetrical way to stack coffee cups and sugar packets, to fold rags at a right angle against flat surfaces, clean side up. Morgan kept the counter area spick-and-span, each element in its place. When she was nervous, she went around correcting things.
“Take-out boxes on the left, cup lids on the right,” she’d shout, slamming them around as she restored order to her universe. “And spoons are handle side up, Isabel.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Isabel would say. When she was mad or just bored she purposely rearranged things just to see how long it took Morgan to find them. It was like a passive-aggressive treasure hunt.
That first lunch, when Norman and I had stopped to pitch in, was a constant blur of people and noise and food. Everyone was screaming at each other, Isabel and Morgan running past with orders, Norman flipping burgers and yelling things to Bick, the other cook, who stayed stonily quiet and cool the entire time. I shoveled ice like my life depended on it, answered the phone and took orders although I knew almost nothing about the menu, and messed up the register so badly it stuck on $10,000.00 and beeped for fifteen minutes straight before Isabel, in a fit of rage, whacked it with a plastic water pitcher. It was Us against Them, clearly, and for once I was part of Us. I didn’t really know what I was doing; I had to go on faith. So I just handed out my drinks and grabbed the phone when it screamed, wrapping the cord around my wrist and stabbing the pen Morgan had tossed me in my hair, the same way Isabel wore hers, and fought on.
“Last Chance,” I’d shout over the din. “Can I help you?”
And now, I was doing it every day.
At first, just walking up to a table full of strangers had scared me to death. I couldn’t even make eye contact, stuttering through the basic questions Morgan had taught me—What would you like to drink? Have you decided? How would you like that cooked? Fries or hush puppies?—my hand literally shaking as it moved across my order pad. It made me nervous to stand there so exposed, all of those people looking at me.
But then, on about my third table, I finally got the nerve to glance up and realized that, basically, they weren’t. For the most part, they were flipping through the menu, extracting Sweet’n Low packets from their toddler’s grip, or so lost in their own conversation that I didn’t even register: twenty minutes later they’d be flagging Isabel down, sure she was the one with their check. They didn’t know or care about me. To them, I was just a waitress, a girl with an apron and a tea pitcher; they didn’t even seem to notice my lip ring. And that was fine with me.