Atticus Lish - Preparation for the Next Life

They gave her a box of cellophane baggies and had her fill each one with one packet of duck sauce, one packet of soy sauce, a napkin, and a plastic fork. See how fast you can do five hundred. Like this — you blow and pop the baggie open. Time to stop. You can do that later. She hauled the dishes in. They were chopping cabbage.

I try, she said.

No, said Rambo, You are dishes, garbage, dumplings, mop.

She filled in for Sunnie on the line, a ladle in her hand, on the balls of her toes, looking out past the lights at the kids wearing their hats sideways, bigger than their parents, hearing them talking: He my nigga, he my homeboy. Zou Lei watched them going by — she watched them as they watched her, examined her, checked her out, and talked about her, staring at her until she looked someplace else.

They talking about you. They say they seen you doing some exercise in the parking lot. Like was that you? No way. She’s the new employee. It was her. I gotta tell someone.

The register girl began to text her sister.

Like, what kind of exercise? Oral exercise?

Gymnastic, Zou Lei said.

The register girl let out a piercing laugh at something she was reading on her phone.

THEIR CANTONESE WAS HARD to understand, it echoed off the tile. They had their backs to her. Her back was to the sink. Get the gwat, they said — she thought they said. It was like hearing someone talk through a prism. The dialect came in different versions, depending on whether they were from inland or the coast. Sunnie went around the corner. They were pulling boxes out from under the metal table legs. Sassoon’s hand went inside and came out with the organs from a chicken, sliding in her fingers. Take the jewels. I cook the jewels, they said, and peeled the membrane off. Take the silk, they said. No need to waste. Take the hand of Buddha. Give me the way. A hand with fat greased over it picked up a knife. She heard something getting cut in coins and thought they called it gwat but it was carrot. What are we doing? We make the hairy crab, wealth of the entire family. Way is very dull. Sunnie came back with bowls and set them on the table. The one is here to put the fat, the jewel, tendon, lotus, umbrella, jewel, fetus chicken. They pointed with the knife at Sunnie, you don’t count arithmetic. She said, I’ll get another one. Three more one! See? She don’t count arithmetic! Sunnie said okay and left again. One times three was three. She realized they meant a bowl. The women kept handling the meat. A monthly smell. I smell you having monthly tension, they said, wearing little bits of yellow gold, small eyes. They went into the dirty boxes on the floor and took out a radish, coined it with the knife. Gills stuck to the metal surface from the mushrooms they were cutting, mud clinging to a root. The lotus, when cut, resembled the cross-section of a pig’s sinuses. Dirt is on it still. Better make it neat or you embrace the Buddha’s feet. She used the cardboard as a dustpan for sweeping underfoot. Dirt clings to it like a country girl.

He say you mess his order up. The order come in stringy beef, chicken, pork, and oyster. Turkey separate. When order, whether the combination plate, that’s a question. You can have the combination of the congee or the rice. If meat, you ask the sauce. The oyster only has the combination with the rice. If they want the chicken with oyster, you tell Rambo so he add it in the back. When she say order, she say the order first and the combination second. If it combine with noodle, she say beef and noodle. To save the time, she say only pork. She say a hundred time a day, don’t say again, everyone go crazy. Just one word, that’s it, everybody know. Simple! Congee another one. If they want the vermicelli, if they want the tendon, don’t keep the secret. You tell in back.

On her break, she did not exercise. There was no time anyway. She put her chopsticks in the shared tub and lifted out a wet nest of greens and dropped them on her rice and sucked them up into her mouth and kept sucking rice and chewing with her head down in the time allotted.

When deliveries came, she unloaded boxes with the Mexicans, and outside of work, she did double distance, sometimes running west in the evening towards Corona. Then she might get on the train and head back towards Skinner, getting a free transfer on the bus when she was tired. Her sneakers were falling apart, the soles completely flat. She looked in the window of a Footlocker.

A broad-shouldered black youth wearing the store uniform spoke to his friend and came outside to see if he could help her. He licked his lips and said, What you lookin for? She was standing hipshot in her jeans, reading prices. Can I be of service?

She got smile lines by her mouth. But she was calculating days until they paid her.

Yeah, I see you. Would you care to step into my office where it’s warmer?

Even then, with rent, she would be leaving herself with next to nothing.

Now, now, now — no need to go. I’m here to give you the service you desire.

Before letting her go, he insisted on shaking her hand, which he kissed, and she yanked her hand away, laughing. He called after her as she went down the block:

I see you! Think it over, ma!

In the morning, she ran farther out in the park, crossing a road after which the park continued on in the direction of the tall isolated buildings that she thought of as mountains. She came to a basketball court where Afghan men and boys were playing soccer in leather sandals in twenty-degree weather. The men had imam’s beards and the boys had loosely jointed running styles from birth defects, depleted uranium.

When she got paid, she bought an off-brand pair of sneakers in a 99-cent store. They tore her heels and she put tape in them to make them better.

When no one was around, she went beneath the steam table and took out a plastic shell and then, after looking around first, picked up a stainless steel cover and checked beneath it. There was nothing under it but water, and she let it go — it sounded like a symbol when it dropped — and wrung her burned hand. She grabbed a dipper and flipped up the next one with the handle. Steam flowed up. She heard someone coming and put it down and stood aside. The cook, Rambo, was coming out, bent over fast-walking as if trying to catch up with a tub he was carrying in front of himself, gripping it with rags. She backed out of his way. He heaved it down, flipped up a lid, and slammed it home. From where she had retreated to, she watched the heat coming off the rice. He took her dipper and flipped the covers up and caught them like a juggler of spinning plates in an oriental circus. She pretended to be organizing drinking cups. He squatted and dialed a flame up. She put the shell back and went and got her rag in the closet with the jackets and purses and the starch. They had shopping bags with their own greens in them sitting on the floor. Box thorn, Shanghai cabbage sprouts. Someone had come in with coffee. She went back out and saw the girl at the register eating a pastry — crumbs on a napkin, coffee rings on a napkin — you could smell the milk and sugar.

What you doing? Hiding back there?

She had wanted a piece of stringy beef.

When she went into the kitchen to wash dishes during the rush, Rambo saluted her.

Leaving work at night, she was cutting through the parking lot to Roosevelt Avenue. In the projects across the street, someone was running across her line of sight. She watched a figure in sweatpants vault over a railing and run up to a steel door and start bouncing her ass back and forth. The door banged open and others came out in ball caps, laughing and making noise. The girl jumped around and clapped and another girl jumped into it with her, clapped at exactly the same time — they slid sideways on cue, danced a couple steps in sync together — the whoop came to Zou Lei from across the avenue — and then they dropped right in step with everybody else, the group of kids passing under the streetlight and becoming a squad of shadows, just their energy moving out into the nighttime and the voice or two that carried back.