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Lunch Bucket


You look like death. Go the fuck home.” We were a Greek chorus chanting, forming a ring around the newly anointed manager. You’ll get us all sick. We’ll hate you. Trust us. By hurrying he could make it before the rain started for real; this was what we said as we leaned over tables and chairs and peered out the diner’s front windows.  Speaking this way was not a job-threatening move because the manager had been one of us until a week ago and he was picky about some things but was not the sort of person to get precious about an expletive. Some of us had been to the former factory where the manager lived; parties among the staff at Fern’s weren’t unheard of on a Tuesday night when the list of needed servers and dishwashers and fry cooks was short. We knew him well enough to know that he would love us for mobilizing en masse to take him by the shoulders, for walking him backward out from behind the counter and between the exactingly arranged rows of seating until, still facing us and still facing away from the two doors, he found his body thrust through them and dumped onto the sidewalk. “Do not pass ‘go’—do not collect $200,” we told him. “Just go the fuck home.”

            We had had a feeling that this was going to be a good year although it was a year like a bad birthday, one of those birthdays that celebrate an insignificant age and that float by without anything substantial happening. Search the internet for mentions of our city of residence together with this particular year, and the first half-dozen results will refer to a single concert that Nirvana played at a bar that had been a tavern for factory workers but that soon would be declared the “Best Club in New York—Even Though It’s in New Jersey.” The band posed in front of the water and the other, more impressive city, with its frontman positioned in the back so that he looked smaller-boned than the rest of them. Cars parked on both sides of the slanted cobblestone streets that the Manhattan girls didn’t like to walk in heels. The cars had narrow bumpers and now look used in pictures even when they weren’t at the time the pictures were taken. Some of us had been here for twenty or thirty years and had lived through childhoods dotted with trips to restaurants similar to the business that now employed us. Our mothers had carted us there along with the friends’ children they were watching for extra cash. Our fathers had brought us in for meals instead of cooking, so that we were sitting at these tables and not at home when we learned to dip chicken in honey or make a seal over the top of a straw with our pinkies. Others of us were newer transplants and were more likely to be found scribbling a poem in free verse on the back of a napkin in the walk-in fridge.

            Everyone was satisfied with the newly anointed manager, whom we also suspected of being a writer but who had been at Fern’s so long that he deserved to be in charge of devising schedules and editing menus and fielding complaints about the temperature of the food. We spent the first three days of his absence joking about how angry he would be to learn what he’d missed out on in tips. The conversation shifted in tone when it got to be the end of the week and he hadn’t yet come back to us. Fern’s Friday night slots were the most coveted; they were when we earned our best income from the drunken demi-heiresses and their fiancés, who liked to imagine themselves as living dangerously if they left their condominiums for a midnight snack. We drew straws and before I knew it I was being asked to walk through twenty-nine minutes of darkness from the diner to the warehouse building where our disappeared leader was expected to be.

            “Really, friends, do we think this is necessary?”

            I wasn’t pleased with the role they’d assigned me or the impending cold or the absence of light outside.

            “Gina, he’s missing a Friday. The condo clientele are back.”

            “They have their wallets out. The girls spent the afternoon hot-rollering their hair.”

            “Something is very wrong, Gina. Are we going to let this stand?”

            No, of course not. I took my beat-up excuse for a purse and slung it over my shoulder and left.

*

            They all assumed that their manager was actually fine. None of them could have guessed what Gina would discover in the neglected factory. Not wanting to seem callous, I’d prefer to claim each of these as true statements, to suggest that my coworkers’ concern was actually playful, manufactured out of a desire for fun or for some sensational news. And I do think that they agreed with me, really: that any of us would have been surprised to walk up too many flights of unfinished concrete stairs and find our neat and presentable leader with his head in a trash can that he carried with him as he opened the door, vomiting.

            “Hey, kiddo,” he managed to raise his head to say.

            Every response I could come up with was obvious and unhelpful.

            “Jesus, dude, you look like shit.”

            That was what I settled on as I helped him back through the badly carpeted hallway, past the stairs and into the room where he slept. I stepped in and knew right away that they had laid the carpet themselves and hadn’t had it cleaned since. The room wasn’t built to be stayed in; its windowlessness made it claustrophobic. “When’s the last time you got out?” I posed the question as though I couldn’t infer the answer. We had ejected him from the diner four days before; for four days he had been throwing up and attempting broth and crackers and throwing up again.

            It was good that I didn’t expect a reply, since I would have had to wait for him to double over from his worn spot on the couch and heave once more into the can and straighten back up to look at me. As things were, I sat not waiting while our manager produced tortured sounds that made me ask myself if he was going to die. His facial skin was dry and red and was peeling where he had scratched it. His forehead was sweatless. There had been nights when I’d woken up at 3 a.m. after a too-raw burger at Corner Bistro. I knew what that looked like. This was not that.

            “Are you keeping down fluids?”

            I should say at this point that I am not a mystical healer of men. In the kitchen, where I poured a glass of water from the tap, I noted the dirty metal cutlery in the larger garbage can. Someone was throwing away forks and spoons with the remains of microwaveable meals because they couldn’t be bothered to clean them. I resolved not to do any dishes while I was there.

            Reopening the door to the room, I saw the newly anointed manager lying prone on the wood floor. “Okay, champ,” I said, selecting the word because it was the sort of sympathetic term a man might use with another man without promising him any prolonged care or affection. “Maybe let’s go to the hospital.”

            He moaned something about insurance, which none of us had.

            “Don’t be cheap. You’re missing Friday night for this.” Another moan. “Come on. Just—get—up.”

            Now I was kicking the back of his thigh with the toe of my right sneaker. He didn’t say anything more, only flinched a little, and I realized he was falling asleep. “Jesus,” I repeated.

            For a while I sat cross-legged beside him, keeping watch, making sure he was breathing in and out. I scratched my fingernails against the carpet; I drank from the glass of water that he hadn’t touched. I’ll confess that I left him alone when I went to find the bathroom and wandered up the rickety internal stairway to the second floor and its one operational toilet. The large open space at the top of the stairs was taken up by a trampoline in a size I hadn’t known they made. The walls were decorated with half-painted canvases done in a pop-art style that was derivative not of Warhol or Lichtenstein but of somebody I couldn’t place. The bathroom was at the end of a long hall, and inside I spent too long staring at myself in the frameless mirror and feeling drunk although I wasn’t.

            When I came back the newly anointed manager was gone. He wasn’t sitting on the couch in the windowless room or leaning against the kitchen counter or lying collapsed on the giant trampoline. I walked up and down the hallways calling his name. It was still dark outside the tall factory windows, but the inside lights were on and blazing.

            “Hello? Anybody?”

            All of a sudden my legs were too tired to support me and I sank and folded my body into a compact package on the tile. I brought my knees to my chest and tucked my chin like I was about to cannonball into the water between our city and the real one. I sat there beside the trampoline like I’d sat next to the manager, thinking about what kind of sucker would stick around.

            As far as I could tell, there was no one home.

*

            The chorus was in fine form on Sunday when our missing leader emerged and rejoined the ranks of the living and serving. We had started to bicker about the shift schedule’s logic and the feasibility of adding Swedish pancakes to the menu of a restaurant that with time was becoming more popular with customers our age than it was with elderly Scandinavians. On some days they seemed like us, the younger customers, and we shook our heads and muttered. “No more pancakes,” we said. Then we would remember that these were people whose passion for croquet was being written about in newspapers and we’d be plunged again into uncertainty; who knew what they actually wanted? “Thank god,” someone declared when the manager strode in. I was the only one who was pissed, who had waited for five hours between sleep and boredom before assuming that the manager was dead on a street corner and allowing myself to stumble back to my apartment.

            I hissed at him over a trough of dirty lettuce in the back of the kitchen. “Dude, where the hell did you go?”

            There was one cook on, and as usual the cook preferred to smoke rather than wash his own vegetables. “Can’t one of the girls do it?” he had asked no one in particular, but I’d volunteered the manager and grabbed him by the sleeve and forced him with me through the bump door that led out of the diners’ view.

            “What are you talking about?”

            The manager sighed my name. I sputtered and swore but couldn’t get him to admit that he had left the eyesore of a warehouse while I was in the bathroom or even to admit that I had been there. No one else had seen me either, he said. No one had so much as mentioned a girl of my description. He had roommates; he had a landlord who was inconveniently omnipresent. Was I sure this hadn’t been a dream? I was a compassionate person; perhaps worry had invaded my subconscious. Asked to vouch for me, my colleagues could only say that I had exited in a huff after drawing the short straw.

            Every shift became an opportunity for me to chase the validation I craved. I described to the manager the unfinished concrete of the external stairs and the precariousness of the interior ones. I described and critiqued the roommates’ forays into painting. I pointed out my intimate knowledge of the trampoline and its size. He granted that I must at some point have visited him at home, but he also had an answer for this.

            “Didn’t you come to one of our house parties last summer?”

            I hadn’t.

*

            Eventually I found new employment. The library in my aunt’s part of Queens had lost a staff member so suddenly that they overlooked my lack of qualifications outside of food service, and I threw out most of what I owned and packed the rest into two boxes that I tossed in the trunk of a cab paid for with the end of my tips.

            Everyone’s stories were ending with moves to and from and across the other city, the real city, and I didn’t want to be everyone but also couldn’t stand the manager’s mild-mannered condescension. On my way out of the dining room on my last day, I lingered behind a customer at the register while the manager rang her up. She took her change and flounced down the aisle between the clusters of eating guests; her food had taken longer than she’d wanted. I waited for the door to close behind her and for him to speak.

            “No hard feelings, Gina. You’re a sweet girl.”

            I would like to be able to say that I stabbed him. I rammed a kitchen knife deep into the cavity of his chest. In reality I only looked at him like he had looked at me raising his head out of the plastic bin. As if I was going to be sick. I gave him a look that was like vomiting and I turned and walked out channeling the woman customer, bumping against chairs and tables not to signal that I was angry but to show that I still existed: how well I could take up space.

 

Suzanne Manizza Roszak's short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Cherry Treefailbetter, Jabberwock ReviewSundog Lit, and SAND. She teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands and is the managing editor of Seneca Review. "Lunch Bucket" comes from her first novel, The Poison Girl, which is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press in late 2024.

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