Small Great Things(79)
I have tried so, so hard to remember what my handsome husband, breathtaking in his tuxedo, was saying. I’d like to believe it was You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or I can’t wait to start our life together. But that is the stuff of novels and movies, and in reality, I am pretty sure we were planning our escape from a roomful of well-wishers so that I could pee.
The reason I know this is because although I cannot remember the conversation that Wesley and I had when that photograph was taken, I do remember the one we had afterward. There was a line at the ladies’ room off the main lobby, and Wesley gallantly volunteered to stand guard at the men’s room so that no one would enter while I was inside. It took me a significant amount of time to maneuver my wedding gown and do my business, and when I finally made it out of the bathroom, a good ten minutes had passed. Wesley was still outside the door, my sentry, but now he was holding a valet claim ticket.
“What’s that?” I asked. We didn’t have a car then; we’d taken public transport to our own wedding.
Wesley shook his head, chuckling. “Some dude just walked up to me and asked me to bring his Mercedes around.”
We laughed and gave the ticket to the bellhop desk. We laughed, because we were in love. Because when life is full of good things, it does not seem important if an old white guy sees a Black man in a fancy hotel and naturally assumes he must work there.
—
AFTER A MONTH of working at McDonald’s, I begin to see the paradox between service and sanitary food preparation. Although all orders are supposed to be prepared in less than fifty seconds, most items on the menu take longer than that to cook. McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish fry for almost four minutes. Chicken Selects take six minutes, and weighing in longest in the fry vat are crispy chicken breasts. Ten-to-one meat takes thirty-nine seconds to cook; four-to-one meat takes seventy-nine seconds. The grilled chicken is actually steamed while it cooks. Apple pies bake for twelve minutes, cookies for two. And yet in spite of all this, we employees are supposed to have the customer walking out the door in ninety seconds—fifty for food prep, forty for a meaningful interaction.
The managers love me, because unlike most of the staff, I do not have to juggle class schedules with my shifts. After decades of working nights, I don’t mind coming in at 3:45 A.M. to open grill, which takes a while to heat up before we unlock the doors at 5:00. Because of my flexibility, I am usually given my favorite job—cashier. I like talking to the customers. I consider it a personal challenge to make them smile before they walk away from the counter. And after literally having women throw things at my head in the thick of labor, being berated for mayo instead of mustard really doesn’t faze me.
Most of our regulars come in the mornings. There are Marge and Walt, who wear identical yellow sweat suits and walk three miles from their house and then get matching hotcake meals with orange juice. There’s Allegria, who’s ninety-three and comes once a week in her fur coat, no matter how warm it is outside, and eats an Egg McMuffin, no meat, no cheese, no muffin. There’s Consuela, who gets four large iced coffees for all the girls at her salon.
This morning, one of the homeless folks who pepper the streets of New Haven wanders in. Sometimes my manager will give them food, if it’s about to be thrown out—like the fries that go unsold after five minutes. Sometimes they come in to warm up. Once, we had a man pee in the bathroom sink. Today, the man who enters has long, tangled hair, and a beard that reaches his belly. His stained T-shirt reads NAMASTAY IN BED, and there is dirt crusted underneath his fingernails.
“Hello,” I say. “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order?”
He stares at me, his eyes rheumy and blue. “I want a song.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A song.” His voice escalates. “I want a song!”
My manager on duty, a tiny woman named Patsy, steps up to the counter. “Sir,” she says, “you need to move along.”
“I want a f*cking song!”
Patsy flushes. “I’m calling the police.”
“No, wait.” I meet the man’s eye and start crooning Bob Marley. I used to sing “Three Little Birds” to Edison as a lullaby every night; I’ll probably remember the words till the day I die.
The man stops screaming and shuffles out the door. I paste a smile on my face so that I can greet the next customer. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” I say and find myself looking at Kennedy McQuarrie.
She is dressed in a shapeless charcoal suit, and she’s holding on to a little girl with strawberry-blond curls erupting from her scalp in a crazy tumble. “I want the pancakes with the egg sandwich,” the girl chatters.
“Well, that’s not an option,” Kennedy says firmly, and then she notices me. “Oh. Wow. Ruth. You’re…working here.”
Her words strip me naked. What did she expect me to do while she was trying to build a case? Dip into my endless savings?
“This is my daughter, Violet,” Kennedy says. “Today is a sort of treat. We, uh, don’t come to McDonald’s very often.”
“Yes we do, Mommy,” Violet pipes up, and Kennedy’s cheeks redden.
I realize she doesn’t want me to think of her as the kind of mother who would feed her kids our fast food for breakfast, no more than I want her to think of me as someone who would work at this job if I had any other choice. I realize that we both desperately want to be people we really aren’t.