Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

It had been fifteen days. Years would go by before she stopped counting days.

She cut vegetables in piles. She trimmed red peppers with wet hands until she became sore from it. She cut mushrooms, she piled them into prep containers for the line. My mise en place, she said, and the other line guys stared at her. “What, your Mr. Plas?” They laughed. She knew she was the garde manger, but they just called her the cold side. That’s me all right, the cold side. She threw lettuce in the stainless steel bowl with sprouts and sunflower seeds and just the right amount of dressing. She tossed it in the bowl with only one hand, just short jerks of her lower arm as she held the rim.

She made an odd discovery — no one asked her anything . She had her carefully worked-out tale of love lost — just enough Bobby to ring true. She realized or guessed that one day she would get to the point where she wouldn’t even know what was true and what she had made up. So she wouldn’t be lying any longer, even though some of it wasn’t true. Someday time would turn the lies into history. But she wasn’t there yet, a long way from it. Fortunately there was a kind of restaurant code that ignored people’s past. There was the dinner or lunch prep time, but talk was of baseball, or the song on the radio, or gas shortages, or the president, or how expensive rent was, or the guy in the news who killed his wife and two small children. No one said, “Caroline, why are you here?” “Where is your family?” “How old are you?” “What is your mother’s maiden name?” “What is your Social Security number?”

At the end of the shift some of the waiters and some of the kitchen staff would go next door to the Wheat Pub for a glass of thick, locally brewed beer or a cocktail. Caroline said no, she felt tired, and even that elicited barely a nod from the others. She was doing okay, she guessed. Twenty-eight days in and no problems except the airless terror that seemed to visit every evening.

Time just went by. There was of course the news. She hardly paid attention. She watched as the released American POWs from Vietnam walked down the steps from the planes and then fell to their knees on the tarmac and kissed the ground. The president seemed to be creeping toward disaster. It had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with them, any of it. She felt everything at a distance. She didn’t follow the Watergate scandal. But it was in the air she breathed. Breaking the law had become endemic. She saw the sweat on the president’s upper lip. She didn’t feel anything. No glee, no satisfaction. Instead she couldn’t stop thinking about Mrs. Mitchell self-destructing right on TV. Her sad, puffy hair. How even under all that stress and her obviously hysterical, perhaps drunk state, she maintained this elaborate, highly puffed coif. And then Mrs. Dean, also coifed, less puffy but equally blond, pale lipstick, shiny, polished face. Both of them stuck with their sweat-drenched husbands.

Faintly, barely, she told herself maybe no one cared about what she had done. She was like John Dean, who described himself to the press as just a “speck in the cosmos.” That was deeply reassuring, and it was also her worst fear. Time just went by.

Caroline walked nearly every evening to the food co-op. She bought bread and vegetables, a refillable plastic gallon jug of local beer. She found a glass of beer, or two, made the move from wake to sleep less fraught. She started a friendly rapport with one of the women at the co-op. She was a big blond girl, braless in a sleeveless T-shirt and proudly sloppy. She first smiled at Caroline, then started to say, Hey, how’s it going? An acquaintance like that is pleasant and then becomes tiring, as there isn’t much to say except Good. Just getting more stuff. How are you? And then you kind of wish the person didn’t work there anymore, so you could buy your things and not have the same conversation over and over. Caroline figured it would be like that. She was surprised when the woman introduced herself one day, about a month after the hellos began.

“I’m Berry,” she said, extending her hand.

“Caroline.”

Berry gave her a wide, straight, white smile. She was more earth baby than mother, fresh and attractive, even with her hair falling out of its clip and her unshaved underarms, which were hard to ignore because Berry enjoyed long over-the-head stretches often. Right as she rang up food, while she waited for your money, she would put an arm over and in back of her head and use the other arm to push on the bent elbow.

“I’m part of this women’s CR group, and we’re having a potluck dinner tonight. You know, empowerment, the usual raising of consciousness, blah, blah. But it’s fun, cool people. Beer, food. Maybe you want to come?” Berry waited a moment, then began bagging Caroline’s purchases. At the co-op you were supposed to bag your own groceries, but Berry maybe needed something to do while she waited for Caroline’s response. Caroline watched her finish, and she thought, What harm could it do? A little company, she realized, was what she desperately wanted.

“Okay.” She smiled at Berry. “I’ll make a sweet potato casserole.”

“Far out,” Berry said and winked at her. Caroline walked home clutching the scribbled address in her hand. She wondered if Berry was a lesbian. Maybe Berry would fall in love with her and help her somehow. Somewhere she remembered Bobby warning her. It was so confusing — she shouldn’t be social, but she couldn’t be conspicuously antisocial. Make sure to stay away from the rads and the movement scene. This was okay, it didn’t sound too radical, it sounded small town and sweet.

Caroline remembered the first time she went to a consciousness-raising group. When you walk into a political group meeting without any men, you get a kind of rush. You realize you can say what you want, you are free from trying to win the approval of the men, the attention of the men, or figuring and worrying over the power relations of the men. Women in these groups made a real attempt at deep, foundational questioning: everything in your identity is potentially not real but an artificial creation of the cultural status quo (always patriarchal and suspect). It had seemed brave and bracing to her at first. She appreciated the issues, but in truth she would resist anything that included questioning and excluding Bobby. She refused to find solidarity that superseded their intimacy. Being “with” Bobby precluded her from questioning everything — and the point of these groups was a little mind-expanding, fundamental questioning. With some serious psychological self-analysis thrown in. After a few meetings, she had dismissed these methods as a kind of narcissism. The other women thought her doubts suspect, if not downright counter-revolutionary. And perhaps they were right. Her reluctance was cowardly. But she had her justifications: other issues and things she cared about were more important than women’s rights. She focused on opposing the war — and what did women’s issues mean in the face of the war?

But now she was Caroline, a woman alone. The Eugene Women’s Collective was totally different. She felt safe instantly. And this group of women seemed to have long recovered from initial reactionary anger and moved on to something more appealing. It was less a witchy coven of man-hating lesbians — a possibility that secretly freaked her out — than a social group with a political agenda. She imagined she had been missing subcultures of mother love, forgiving and nurturing. Nothing like the catty cliques of high school and college, where beauty reigned and all subjects related to men. These women acted easy and friendly. They ate and drank, and then began, nearly reluctantly, a discussion of various issues: women’s rights, certainly, but also vegetarianism, ecology and local businesses. Two of the women ran the Black & Red Book Collective. One had an Angela Davis Afro and her smooth, militant demeanor to match. That was Maya. She was the only black woman at the meeting, so the others constantly deferred to her. The other woman, Mel, never touched Maya but nevertheless made it clear they were a couple. The discussion turned to local politics, the University of Oregon and the chauvinism of the student activist organizations.