Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (4 page)

“Kelly, are you still going to make it to my birthday party next weekend? We're going to watch
Splash
and play bingo.”

Splash
was my favorite movie; bingo was my favorite group game, because it involved no physical or mental challenges, making it impossible for me to totally lose my cool in a social situation from an excess of competitive fervor.

“I hope I'll make it, Aimee,” I said, “but I haven't seen my schedule yet.”

Arif shook his head. “It's illegal, Kelly. You can't have a job if you're twelve.”

“Arif!” I threw my hand on my heart, like my gram does when she sings the national anthem. “I've had a Social Insurance Number since I was nine! The Canadian government needs my tax dollars so they can give homeless guys stitches and eye patches for free!” I tilted back, studiously, onto the heels of my purple Dr. Martens. “Okay, so, guess what job I got?”

Arif shook his head and drove his hands into his pockets. “I don't know. Delivering papers?”

I pointed at him. “THAT'S AMATEUR HOUR, ARIF!”

My peers went silent. I just shook my head. “I'm working weekends, washing dishes at a German restaurant.”

The Schnitzelhaus was a steamy, sausage-y smorgasbord of all things German, a Black Forest log cabin full of scary lederhosen and employment. Like a lot of young girls with people-pleasing issues, I'd invested hours of my youth in
The Sound of Music
. I'd just finished a unit at school on World War II Germany—where I got in huge trouble for drawing swastikas on a blackboard—so I was already fully imaginatively invested in this place. If you'd told me every living Von Trapp descendant was living in the restaurant basement, making those delicious potato pancakes, I would have chosen to believe it. It looked exactly the way you might picture the witch's house in “Hansel and Gretel,” only bigger, and run by a German man named Arnie and his family instead of a cannibal witch.

The Schnitzelhaus was a popular dinner destination for my family. My parents loved their schnitzel, and like any sane parents, they loved getting out of making a family dinner. I didn't particularly love the idea of people watching me eat bratwurst in public, but I loved the attention the German family lavished on the customers. Arnie would regularly tell me I was gorgeous, even though I was the only kid in the world who wore the same glasses as Sophia on
The Golden Girls
. Even if he was just trying to move some bratwurst, I didn't care.

One day, Arnie casually leaned over our table and looked straight at me. “Would you like to wash dishes here? Start next weekend. Seven dollars an hour.”

OH MY GOD. Here he was, a champion of my underdog looks, and now he was basically asking me to join his family! The sideshow circus German family in the Schnitzelhaus wanted me in their fold. How could I say no?

This would be my first foray into the real world. Maturity in the making.

I went home that night, belly full of bratwurst, thinking one thing and one thing only:
seven dollars an hour.
Just think of the
Archie
comics that would buy. I was a mature dishwasher in a locally famous German restaurant!

Next stop, training bra.

I'd been dreaming of work my whole life. Not doing any, but dreaming about it. Back when I was nine, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. And I shared my vision with my entire fifth grade class in an oral report titled, “What My Future Holds.”

I stood before my class with my French-braided hair, my giant glasses, and my splatter-painted, neon-green sweatshirt my mom made. (Along with being a nurse, my mom was also a genius at making a little cash on the side, starting this hand-painted clothing line when I was a kid. I always wore her sweatshirt creations to school to promote her and said things like, “You know who made this? Splatter Ink by Gaye. Available at Bonnie Doon Mall!”) I gazed out upon my people, cleared my throat, and smiled.

Monologues were my chance to shine.

“It would be great to grow up and go to school and eventually become a lawyer,” I began. “I'd like to become a criminal lawyer. I'd love to go into jails and talk to criminals about why they murder people and then try to figure out a way to argue that they're innocent. It must be very fun and satisfying work to feel like you're always right! Until then, I will get jobs and make money. I'd also like to have babies, a lot of kids. Maybe six.” Then I pulled out my deadpan pause for emphasis and comedic effect. I looked out at my classmates, who were suddenly paying attention, then smiled. “Because kids are radical! Right, guys?!” Then I pulled at my sweatshirt with one hand, pointed to it with the other, and winked. “Splatter Ink by Gaye! Available at Bonnie Doon Mall!”

Flash-forward three years. I was about to become the first kid in my seventh grade class to get a job. A
real
job—not a paper route, not putting neighbors' babies to sleep and raiding pantries for treats my parents wouldn't buy, not feeding a friend's guinea pig over spring break when they got to go to Costa Rica and I got to stay home and feed somebody else's guinea pig. And I was shamelessly proud.

 

I woke up on my first day of work far too early and far too eager. I put on my uniform—a white blouse and black trousers—and sat down in our TV room to wait. I scanned through the channels playing Saturday-morning cartoons and scoffed. All of my friends were sitting in their living rooms in their jammies watching this dreck, and I was basically Oprah Winfrey. Making my way up in this world, paying taxes, becoming a mogul.

Two hours later, I strode into the restaurant like I was about to accept my Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role. I was led into the kitchen by Dirk, a tired and indifferent teenage child of Arnie's. Dirk looked like the Aryan boy from
The Sound of Music
, only far less jolly. He led me to the dishwasher.

“Take the dirty dishes. Spray them off into this sink. Fill the plastic tray. Slide into the machine. Shut it. Wait until this light turns on. Open it. Pull out the clean dishes and stack them over there with the other clean dishes.”

“That's IT?!” I shouted, clapping my hands together. He rolled his eyes and walked away.

I could not believe how easy this was going to be. All my dumb friends were babysitting snotty kids, and all I had to do was stand still and move some stuff with my hands and make money? It was like magic.

But it was like
bad
magic—not the kind of voodoo or Louisiana magic you fantasize about. This was magic like when your mom hired a local magician to come to your fifth birthday party, and he accidentally killed the rabbit by asphyxiation in his top hat. I dug into the dishes with my customary vigor, but after a few minutes the novelty of standing still and moving stuff with my hands to make money wore off. I was bored. I couldn't even listen to my own music while I worked, because I'd chosen to ask my mom for purple Dr. Martens instead of a yellow Sony Walkman for Christmas. As a result, I had to listen to German music and a symphony of guttural sounds from the bowels of the kitchen.

I looked at one plate with tiny green flowers and knew it had already come through three times that morning with different people's spit and leftovers on it.

I looked at my hands and knew I'd had different people's spit and leftovers on them.

I looked at the line of schnitzel-wanters out the front door and thought about how many more cups, forks, and plates covered in spit and chewed up gristle were already on their way back to me and my hands, and I realized: my mom would totally freak out if she knew how filthy this was.

Backstage at the Schnitzelhaus, it was quite a scene.

The oldest two kids were working the griddle with Arnie, who took frequent time-outs to flirt with the wives and pretty children. Pretty children who weren't me, that is, since I was at the dishwashing station now. He hadn't complimented me ALL MORNING, but I guess seeing me in my fancy clothes with my parents was a little different from seeing me in my now-grease-soiled white blouse and pruney hands. The youngest of Arnie's kids were setting up the cutlery and bussed tables with the mom. All of a sudden, as I gazed about, I realized: not only was I the only person working at this restaurant without common DNA, but I had the absolute worst job in the place. I began to suspect this wasn't a coincidence. There I was scraping and washing plates, cutlery, and cups—staring at bits of meat some people would spit onto the plate when they couldn't chew through the gristle. Some people licked the syrup off the plate. Some people piled all the food they didn't eat into the middle of the plate, mashed it all together, and then left a huge tongue print in the mound. My mom may have been a hypochondriac, but if there was one thing I'd learned from her, it was that any display like this should be treated as if it were an open petri dish sitting on a shelf at the Centers for Disease Control.

Here is what I knew in that moment: washing dishes wasn't glamorous, even in a locally famous German restaurant. I'd been duped into this job by a family of conspirators. Duped by Arnie, who'd been complimenting me for months just so he could sucker me into being his family's whipping girl. The family had probably been fighting for years over who had to man the dishwashing station when the patriarch realized he could solve the problem by tricking a four-eyed wannabe Maria into saying, “
Sure, I'll be your
slave!
”

I stood there fuming, all seventy pounds of me, as I imagined Arnie and his family gathered around the fireside at night beside a giant stuffed grizzly bear, with a taxidermied moose head looking down from the mantel and an Alpine hat hanging from its antler. I could just see them laughing as they stuffed their chubby faces with apple strudel, cream puffs, and fancy German candies. “Oh! Ze little girl mit ze giant glasses and ze unibrow! She vill vash our dishes and ve vill be free!! Ha ha ha!!”

I slammed the dishwasher shut and chose revenge as my copilot. I would trade jobs with one of his German kids.

I set my sights on the toast job. Toast smelled better than dirty dishes,
and there were no pinkeye germs on clean toast.
I took a moment to psych myself up, then headed over to Dirk, the toast kid.

“Hey, Dirk,” I said in my most convincing tone. “Let's trade. I'll handle the toast for a while and you can have some fun with this machine!” I draped myself over the machine in my best Barker's Beauties display pose.

“Uh, no, thanks,” he said, turning away.

I got right up in his face. Shameless. “But I'm
really good
at toast. That's all I eat at home.”

“No.”

“I love toast more than you love toast.”

“No.”

“At home, I have an eight-toast toaster and no one ever uses it but me. I toast everything for everyone who comes through my door. Once, at Christmas, we had twenty-two family members over and I toasted everything for everyone for three mornings in a row.
And
BLTs were served at lunch, so that was a lot of toasting done by
moi
. None of them burned.”

“NO.”

“Toast is in my blood.”

“NO.”

“Speaking of blood, I'm going to eventually get pinkeye if I keep washing those dirty dishes. People touch their eyes, then touch the plates, and I will get pinkeye and my mom is going to be really mad at you. So I'm taking over the toast.” I started picking up handfuls of bread and shoving them into the toaster.

Dirk grabbed my wrists and looked at me like I was totally insane. “Are you totally insane?” he shouted, pulling the bread from the toaster.

“I can't dishwash, Dirk. It's gross. You're a boy—gross is your normal. You do dishes. Look at how sloppy your buttering is! Dirk, you're doing that toast a disservice.”

He looked up from the toast. “Just quit the job if you don't like it.”

I couldn't quit. Quitting is not in my nature. I adapt. I'm an adapter. I find myself in a situation I don't like, and I adapt to make it tolerable. I'll play tricks on myself in order to get through an event—like the time Baba died on my birthday and I pretended it was an awesome prank she was pulling just for me.

Then again, I was also very lazy and dishwashing was too much. Trading my job for another one in the restaurant wasn't quitting, it was metamorphosis.

I stormed into the doorway of the front of the restaurant house.

“Arnie!”

He turned around, shocked to see me.
Time for a monologue,
I thought.
Time to shine.

“Hey, Arnie.” I smiled. “I'm cute, and you know it. Right? What I should really be doing is playing on my good looks to help the restaurant.” I pushed my giant Harry Caray glasses up onto my face with the palm of my hand. “I should be in the front of the house. The hostess. And you can go back to the griddle!!” YES!! Remind him of what he really loves. The griddle is his passion! He doesn't want to be out there, he wants to cook! “You're the griddle
master
, Arnie! I can take over out here. I have a ton of cute outfits from Benetton I can wear.” Okay, you have one Benetton sweater your mom bought for you for Valentine's Day. Don't get crazy. “Maybe you could hire my little sister to do the dishes?” HA HA HA! Lauren, payback time for everything.

Arnie dismissed me with a wave. “Go back to your station. The dishes are piling up. Go!”

Scheisse!

In the back, my good looks hidden from view, I stood at the dishwashing station and stared at a booger someone had wiped on the side of a plate. People were disgusting. My back was sore. My dishwashing lever arm was sore. Thankfully I only had another hour left of looking at the plates, these canvases of human filth.

I woke up the next day sick to my stomach after dreaming of dirty plates—stacks of them, marching toward me as I ran through a carnival naked. I didn't get up early and get dressed and sit downstairs, dying to get to work, like I'd done the day before. Instead, I sat in the claw-foot bathtub full of hot water in our family's little nook of a bathroom, and I cried. I did it quietly, of course: if my mom heard me crying before work, I'd never hear the end of the questions, “Do you have strep? Were you raped?!” But I deserved that special tub time, even if it was just five minutes' worth. If Oprah taught me nothing else, she taught me that. Bath and candles, girl. Bath and candles.