Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“You get hepatitis from unwashed lettuce,” I said. “If there’s anything safe from the perils of the food chain, it’s ramen.”

“But do you refrigerate what you don’t eat? Each time you reheat it, you’re killing good bacteria, which then can’t keep the bad bacteria in check. A guy got sick from reheating Chinese noodles, and his son died from it. I read it in the Times .” With this, she put a jovial arm around my neck. I continued walking, a little stunned. Then, just as quickly, she dropped her arm and stopped walking. I stopped, too.

“Did you notice that I put my arm around you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Next time, I’ll have to chop it off.”

“I don’t want you to get sick,” she said. “Let’s eat at Commons.”

In the cold air, her arm had felt good.

THE PROBLEM with Commons was that it was too big; its ceiling was as high as a cathedral’s, but below it there were no awestruck worshippers, only eighteen-year-olds at heavy wooden tables, chatting over veal patties and Jell-O.

We got our food, tacos stuffed with meat substitute, and made our way through the maze of tables. The Koreans had a table. Each singing group had a table. The crew team sat at a long table of its own. We passed the black table. Heidi was so plump and moonfaced that the sheer quantity of her flesh accentuated just how white she was. The black students gave me a long, hard stare.

“How you doing, sista?” a guy asked, his voice full of accusation, eyeballing me as though I were clad in a Klansman’s sheet and hood. “I guess we won’t see you till graduation.”

“If,” I said, “you graduate.”

The remark was not well received. As I walked past, I heard protests, angry and loud as if they’d discovered a cheat at their poker game. Heidi and I found an unoccupied table along the periphery, which was isolated and dark. We sat down. Heidi prayed over her tacos.

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” I said.

“Not in the God depicted in the Judeo-Christian Bible, but I do believe that nature’s essence is a spirit that—”

“All right,” I said. I had begun to eat, and cubes of diced tomato fell from my mouth when I spoke. “Stop right there. Tacos and spirits don’t mix.”

“You’ve always got to be so flip,” she said. “I’m going to apply for another friend.”

“There’s always Mr. Dick,” I said. “Slurp, slurp.”

“You are so lame. So unbelievably lame. I’m going out with Mr. Dick. Thursday night at Atticus. His name is Keith.”

Heidi hadn’t mentioned Mr. Dick since the day I’d met her. That was more than a month ago and we’d spent a lot of that time together. I checked for signs that she was lying; her habit of smiling too much, her eyes bright and cheeks full so that she looked like a chipmunk. But she looked normal. Pleased, even, to see me so flustered.

“You’re insane! What are you going to do this time?” I asked. “Sleep with him? Then when he makes fun of you, what? Come pound your head on my door reciting the collected poems of Sylvia Plath?”

“He’s going to apologize for before. And don’t call me insane. You’re the one going to the psychiatrist.”

“Well, I’m not going to suck his dick, that’s for sure.”

She put her arm around me in mock comfort, but I pushed it off, and ignored her. She touched my shoulder again, and I turned, annoyed, but it wasn’t Heidi after all; a sepia-toned boy dressed in khakis and a crisp plaid shirt was standing behind me. He thrust a hot-pink square of paper toward me without a word, then briskly made his way toward the other end of Commons, where the crowds blossomed. Heidi leaned over and read it: “Wear Black Leather — the Less, the Better.”

“It’s a gay party,” I said, crumpling the card. “He thinks we’re fucking gay.”

HEIDI AND I signed on to work at the Saybrook dining hall as dishwashers. The job consisted of dumping food from plates and trays into a vat of rushing water. It seemed straightforward, but then I learned better. You wouldn’t believe what people could do with food until you worked in a dish room. Lettuce and crackers and soup would be bullied into a pulp in the bowl of some bored anorexic; ziti would be mixed with honey and granola; trays would appear heaped with mashed potato snow women with melted chocolate ice cream for hair. Frat boys arrived at the dish-room window, en masse. They liked to fill glasses with food, then seal them, airtight, onto their trays. If you tried to prize them off, milk, Worcestershire sauce, peas, chunks of bread vomited onto your dish-room uniform.

When this happened one day in the middle of the lunch rush, for what seemed like the hundredth time, I tipped the tray toward one of the frat boys as he turned to walk away, popping the glasses off so that the mess spurted onto his Shetland sweater.

He looked down at his sweater. “Lesbo bitch!”

“No,” I said, “that would be your mother.”

Heidi, next to me, clenched my arm in support, but I remained motionless, waiting to see what the frat boy would do. He glared at me for a minute, then walked away.

“Let’s take a smoke break,” Heidi said.

I didn’t smoke, but Heidi had begun to, because she thought it would help her lose weight. As I hefted a stack of glasses through the steamer, she lit up.

“Soft packs remind me of you,” she said. “Just when you’ve smoked them all and you think there’s none left, there’s always one more, hiding in that little crushed corner.” Before I could respond she said, “Oh, God. Not another mouse. You know whose job that is.”

By the end of the rush, the floor mats got full and slippery with food. This was when mice tended to appear, scurrying over our shoes; more often than not, a mouse got caught in the grating that covered the drains in the floor. Sometimes the mouse was already dead by the time we noticed it. This one was alive.

“No way,” I said. “This time you’re going to help. Get some gloves and a trash bag.”

“That’s all I’m getting. I’m not getting that mouse out of there.”

“Put on the gloves,” I ordered. She winced, but put them on. “Reach down,” I said. “At an angle, so you get at its middle. Otherwise, if you try to get it by its tail, the tail will break off.”

“This is filthy, eh.”

“That’s why we’re here,” I said. “To clean up filth. Eh.”

She reached down, but would not touch the mouse. I put my hand around her arm and pushed it till her hand made contact. The cries from the mouse were soft, songlike. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God, ohmigod.” She wrestled it out of the grating and turned her head away.

“Don’t you let it go,” I said.

“Where’s the food bag? It’ll smother itself if I drop it in the food bag. Quick,” she said, her head still turned away, her eyes closed. “Lead me to it.”

“No. We are not going to smother this mouse. We’ve got to break its neck.”

“You’re one heartless bitch.”

I wondered how to explain that if death is unavoidable it should be quick and painless. My mother had died slowly. At the hospital, they’d said it was kidney failure, but I knew, in the end, it was my father. He made her so scared to live in her own home that she was finally driven away from it in an ambulance.

“Breaking its neck will save it the pain of smothering,” I said. “Breaking its neck is more humane. Take the trash bag and cover it so you won’t get any blood on you, then crush.”

The loud jets of the steamer had shut off automatically and the dish room grew quiet. Heidi breathed in deeply, then crushed the mouse. She shuddered, disgusted. “Now what?”

“What do you mean, ‘now what?’ Throw the little bastard in the trash.”