Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

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.