Flings Read online

  Light again, and a dark shape blocking most of it, but a light-dark shape if that makes any sense, and long, thin golden strands descending through the grille mesh, tickling my nose. That’s hair. (And so much then for the hair catch analogy.) The strands belong to one of our newer Melissa/Jessicas, who must have looked out the front window and noticed that a certain purple obscenity had dropped out of the landscape. Already proving herself a team player, this Melissa/Jessica. I ought to learn her real name, would ask her except I should probably already know it: there’s a good chance Ethan told me, or that she herself has, possibly when I interviewed and hired her, which it’s entirely possible I’m the one who did.

  “Hey,” she says. “Let me help you.” As if I could stop her; as if she could help. But I don’t say anything. Let her tug and jostle me a while; the sooner she tires herself out, the sooner she’ll go get Ethan. Even through the stink of this suit, I can smell her: whatever lotion she uses, coconut-y, and beneath that a hint of something danker, the smell of her futile exertion, maybe, though I may be smelling myself.

  My nose still tickles. I’m holding back a sneeze, and then all of a sudden I’m losing hold, have lost it, am making a noise that’s half donkey bray and half kicked cat. My whole body shudders with the force of it, snot all over my face, the suit rocking slightly from side to side on the metal hoop sewn beneath the fur of the mushroom cap’s rim.

  The good news is that observing this physics lesson seems to have given Melissa/Jessica an idea. “I’ve like totally got this,” she says, and rolls me over on my rim so I’m facing downward, suspended two feet above the earth, watching ants march across the concrete in my shadow while gravity, happily, works some of this snot off my face. Melissa/Jessica digs around in the fur of the mushroom stem, searching for the industrial-gauge zipper, which is located exactly where I’d never be able to reach it even if the suit had arms. She unzips me in one long quick pull, like it’s prom night and she’s me and I’m the best she could get.

  With my newly expanded range of motion I wriggle an arm free, wipe my face off with my hand, wipe my hand off on the grille mesh, then stand up and step out. The suit is splayed open on the ground like a butchered animal, a husked chrysalis, an egg sac from which I’m emerging, a born or reborn creature, baffled by the sunlight, covered head to toe in slime.

  (When you go steady with a poetry prof for as long as I did, you can’t help learning a few things about poetry, so don’t go getting incredulous—or, worse yet, impressed—that I talk so much less dumb than I live.)

  We can’t leave the suit where it’s fallen, so I throw my arms around its dead weight, heave, and lift. It’s not especially heavy—thirty pounds at a guess, maybe forty—or difficult to maneuver, provided of course that you aren’t straitjacketed inside it.

  I come back inside with the suit in a fireman’s carry, having refused Melissa/Jessica’s offers of assistance (and also having failed to learn or relearn her name). I march it right through the dining room and the kitchen, on back to the supply closet. I drop it on the floor in the corner, give it a few kicks and a stream of curses, and when I turn around she’s standing there holding a large Sprite with extra ice in one hand and a clean shirt in the other. The shirt is a size too small and has already had its neck V’d. “All I could find,” she says.

  “Where the fuck is Ethan?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  Deep breaths. I’m taking deep breaths. First in for three whole seconds, then three seconds of stillness, then three seconds to exhale. I had planned to end this day with another raise for what I’ve been through, but the experience will be worthless in the retelling; it will sound like mere slapstick to Ethan, and that’s assuming he’s able to follow the plot.

  I take my shirt off and drop-kick it toward the mushroom suit, pick a dishrag from the reserve stash we keep back here, start to wipe myself dry. She watches me do all this, following the movement of the cloth up and down my body with her eyes. Well, why not? I’ve got good definition. My momentary weakness in the preceding episode was strictly the product of circumstance, the heat index and smothering getup. In the normal course of things I set an example of rude health in the enviable young-Whitmanic sense. What I mean is, it’s no surprise that this chick’s scoping me, even though my hair gel evaporated while I was frying in the suit.

  When I’m clean and crammed into the new shirt, I look at her and see she’s still looking. “This is for you, too,” she says, handing me the Sprite. Then she mumbles something about needing to get back out on the floor, which is understandable. This fiasco’s been unfolding for half an hour already, and the girl works for tips.

  I drink half the Sprite, then pour Svedka into the cup until it’s full again, the logic being that if I’m stuck dressed like a sorority girl at a Phish show then I might as well drink like one. Four o’clock hits, which means it’s shift change, also time to switch out the register, get the lunch take counted and into the safe. Still no sign of Ethan, which doesn’t surprise me. He likes his restaurant much better when it’s closed.

  I plant myself at the front bar with my supersize cocktail, wish a good day to one and all Melissa/Jessicas as they clock out. Most can’t seem to get their gazes above my V-neck—my chest hair like a squirrel in the jaws of a rainbow, which is something to see, I guess. I put a new drawer in the register, put the lunch drawer up on the bar in front of me, and set out to do the skim before I’m too bombed to count. I use a very sophisticated system. First I count up all the money; then I imagine what Ethan’s likely to expect the take to have been, and from there ballpark what he’s likely to notice missing. Then I remind myself who I’m dealing with and double the figure, plus another forty bucks for my trouble. Then I count it again to be sure.

  I’m almost finished when I notice someone standing nearby. Not looming, exactly, but decidedly in my space. My first thought is I’m about to get robbed, and that I deserve it, sitting out here like an asshole with these stacks of money. But when I bother to look up, I see it’s not a robber but rather a girl, albeit not the kind we’re used to seeing in here. She’s got a helmet of thick curly hair and a truck-like bearing, is wearing black slacks and a chambray button-up, long sleeves in this fucking weather, which explains the sweat on her brow, lip, and neck. I’m not going to stand up because if I do she’ll know she’s taller than I am. Not a lot taller, but taller.

  “Hi,” she says in what sounds like a best-guess imitation of perkiness, as if she’s been watching all day through the windows, trying to figure out what the Melissa/Jessicas sound like based on the way they walk. “Do you have any openings? I brought a résumé.” She holds out a paper that I don’t take from her. Her name is centered in bold letters at the top of it, followed by email address, phone number, and grade point average. Below that the page is inkless, a tundra.

  “Appolinaria Pavlovna Sungold,” I say. “You’re shitting me.”

  She shrugs. “Most people call me Polina.”

  “I think I’ll call you Sungold.”

  She shrugs again. “Does this mean I’m hired?”

  “Hang on a sec there, Sungold. Okay. This place has a certain kind of, uh, vibe. Do you know what a vibe is? How sometimes you’re somewhere and it’s like things seem to mystically vibrate in a certain way? Don’t answer that. But look around you. Look at the other waitresses, the stuff on the walls. Look at me, for God’s sake, this thing I’m wearing as a shirt.”

  “You mean your shirt?”

  “Right. I am wearing what is worn here. By the girls, I mean. I don’t wear this usually, but today is special. I guess what I’m trying to say is, when you look around, does this feel like your wavelength? Can you see yourself vibrating here?”

  “I could wear the shirt the way it comes, without cutting it.”

  “Not on your life, sister. The guy who owns this place? Forget it. Not on your life and certainly not on mine.”

  But you know what? I’m starting to like this Sungold.
And now that I’ve mentioned Ethan I’m picturing his disappointment, not to mention the stifled confusion on Melissa/Jessica’s collective face. Then Sungold says the thing that seals it, what amounts to the magic words: “I can tell what you’re doing with the money. For ten percent of whatever you’re taking I’ll not only help you but I won’t rat you out.”

  Ten percent! Jesus, that’s decency. Downright chivalrous. I count her share out on the spot.

  But the sexy T-shirt thing is a problem, one I worry may prove intractable until I see Sungold’s solution. She lays her ladies’ XL out on a cutting board in the back. The sleeves go first, then the hem; the neck plunges; a diamond cutout pattern blossoms up the sides. She slips it on over her chambray and asks me to show her around.

  She comes to work every day like this, and while it doesn’t do her bearing (or her sweating) any favors, she never messes up an order or lets a plate sit in the kitchen, so between the occasional pity tip and what we’re stealing she more than makes up for what she loses not showing her tits off, for having tits no one wants to see.

  As predicted—as counted on—Ethan hates her. He says she compromises brand integrity, but I stand firm. It’s important, I tell him, to have at least one other person around who can lift a box of bread dough or the ten-gallon bucket of feta cheese. It’s not as if he’s going to carry these things himself. Sungold could wear the mushroom suit, too, I bet, though I never suggest it, and Ethan has the memory of an infant or a goldfish, which is why he’s such a shitty capitalist and such an amazing boss. The suit lies fermenting in the supply closet, forgotten until HQ calls with the address of the store we’re supposed to pass it on to, a newish franchise in another college town—Valdosta, Georgia, some hundred miles north of here, give or take. So here I am, wrangling its rancid, still-damp, mold-fluoresced corpse into the back of my truck.

  “Take this for gas, man,” says Ethan, little thicket of bills between two fingers like a stubbed-out cigar. “Get lunch or whatever. I appreciate you doing this. There’s a show at Side Bar tonight that I’d seriously die if I missed it. You ever heard of the Flower Rangers? Killer. You should check ’em out.” My God but he’s a sorry sight in daylight: crow’s-feet and gin blossoms, scabby eczemas at the hairline, neck tripled up on itself in blood-flushed rolls. He looks like he might die at the concert, or maybe on the way to the venue, or maybe right here while we’re talking if I don’t hurry up.

  I take his money, tell him he’s more than welcome, that it’s my pleasure. “Have fun tonight, Ethan. Get your dick sucked for me.”

  “Sure thing,” he says, though we both know he won’t.

  Sungold’s in my shotgun seat, rolling us cigarettes. The second part of this favor is I have to bring her with me. Ethan was adamant. I pretended first to resist, then to relent.

  Sungold isn’t her original last name, obviously—I mean historically—though it is the name that she was born with. Her father picked it out not long after he came over as a strapping young bootstrapper in the early ’80s. He saw it printed on the side of a box of tomatoes in a grocery store and thought it sounded American, Floridian, full of hope: sun and gold. It wasn’t until he had a daughter that he got sentimental, nostalgic for the homeland and patronymics. Her three older brothers are named Franklin, Reagan, and Henry Ford.

  She’s telling me this while we’re driving through the void that Florida becomes outside of all city limits (and sometimes within them). I tell her she’s lucky he didn’t spot an Ovengold turkey in the deli case, or a roadside stand selling sunchokes or, worse yet, boiled peanuts. “Although boiled peanuts are pretty awesome. Holler if you see a sign. We’ll stop.”

  She gets the Cajun flavor and I get original recipe, the kind that taste like hot, slippery salt. Then the sky opens up with a thunderclap, unleashes white blinding curtains of rain that at first I think we should power through, try to get on the other side of, but after we’re passed by a big rig that was invisible until the moment it boomed by us, I decide to pull over, wait it out. We taste each other’s peanuts and talk about music, specifically how much we hate Ethan’s taste in it. She says she likes hip-hop, mostly, but also Joni Mitchell and the Kinks. I like hip-hop, too, but for some reason scroll past Jay Z and Kanye to find the most esoteric thing in my arsenal, this Royal Trux album where they sound like the Rolling Stones in a blender full of heroin—one of the poetry prof’s touchstones, as if that needed to be said. The poetry prof once told me that for people who think Stephen Malkmus is Jesus, the Royal Trux are like the Old Testament. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t know—or care—who Stephen Malkmus was, and she chose to interpret my silence as contemplative pleasure (our signature form of miscommunication) so she Dropboxed me the MP3s, which got cloud-backupped to my phone the last time I updated, but I guess I’m the one who never deleted the album. I have no idea what I want Sungold to think of it, or of me for having chosen to put it on. In the rearview mirror I can see the mushroom suit getting ruined in the truck bed while we fill the cabin with American Spirit smoke and try to relate to these schedule-one ballads—if they are ballads—which come to think of it make more sense right now than they ever have before. They’re the perfect sound track to this obliterating rain.

  I want to revise something I said earlier, the thing about nobody wanting to see Sungold’s tits. I want to see them. I think she wears a sports bra beneath her chambray, holding back great sloppy fat ones, and I want to take them across the face. She’s easy to be around and smart, and I like the sound of her voice, apart from whatever it is she’s talking about, though increasingly I find myself attending to the actual words she says. I hired her as a joke on Ethan, and now I feel awful about it, but also grateful to get to have her around all the time, which in turn makes me feel both better and worse. No more salacious idolatry of Melissa/Jessica—that honey trap, that photo spread. I want to fuck Sungold till she prays in her mother tongue. I want to suck my own come off the tip of her clitoris. I want to love her everywhere she stinks from and give her half of everything I steal.

  I start telling all this to Sungold but somehow it comes out wrong. She gets hung up on the preface to my conversion, doesn’t like my summary judgment of Melissa/Jessica, is offended on their behalf and never mind the fact that their mere existence has made her own life more difficult in a thousand ways—though I should admit that this is a fact whose facticity she disputes. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned her clit at all.

  Sungold has this idea that women are to be respected irrespective of who they are and what they look (or smell) like—that is, for no reason. She says I talk about women like they’re some exotic species of animal, as though hunt-and-capture were the only mode of interaction, as if their bodies were a personal provocation, as though their lives were an aspect of my life rather than self-contained, inviolable, requiring no justification, and lived without reference to me.

  For a minute it seems like we’re finally understanding each other. I start to get excited again. A minute later this turns out to have been premature. Simply to understand a position is not to endorse it, apparently. Her disgust is palpable, material, feels as real as the rain on the windshield or the mud we discover we’re stuck in when I try to put the truck back on the road.

  “What now?” I say and she looks at me in this way that says, I am babysitting a tiresome and probably retarded child. It’s the same look I give Ethan whenever he’s not looking at me.

  “We push,” she says, and opens the truck door, hops out, hits the mud with a squelch.

  The mushroom suit’s pulp by the time we get it to the restaurant. The manager meets us in the parking lot, unhappy. He’s got facial hair that tells you he knows how to use all the alternate heads his electric razor came with, that he’s paid for more than one Baptist girl’s abortion but still votes Republican because he expects to retire rich. He can see we’re muddy but he doesn’t offer us use of his facilities. He doesn’t even offer us to-go cups. We are obviously the worst thing th
at has happened to him all month.

  Through the front windows we can see that here the servers’ shirts have not been cut to pornographic ribbons. They wear 501s and arch-supportive closed-toe shoes; a range of genders, age brackets, and body types are represented among their ranks. Still not a black person to be seen anywhere, but of course there are miracles and then there are miracles. As the busboys unload the carcass we can hear jazz at a civilized decibel. It’s probably a miserable place to work. I bet they notice if you steal.

  “Thanks for the hospitality,” I say to the manager.

  “Thanks for nothing,” he says and smacks the truck gate, as if we needed another clue that it’s time to leave.

  I use the drive home to walk back the worst of what I said during my epiphany. “I’m not unteachable,” I tell Polina. “My worldview could stand some realignment, sure.”

  “I’m not your teacher,” she says. “I’m your employee, your accessory to fraud, and your friend, kind of, or I was until you decided my mouth would look better with your dick in it, which by the way is the reason that me and the other waitresses are more the same than different, why we have solidarity—or ought to have it—even if they are a nasty bunch of anorexic airhead cunts.”

  Startled, I take my eyes off the road and look over, find her smiling shyly in the passenger seat, two fresh smokes rolled up and ready to go.

  “You are my teacher,” I say. “A magic Russo American sent to my life to make it better—to make me better. But your life is also a life. I see that now. I’m going to make your life better, somehow.”

  “Fifty percent would be better.”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d remember I said that,” I say. “I mean it was mixed in with all that other stuff that made you mad.”