TREYF (17 page)

“What shall I make for you, Elissala?” Gaga says to me every day, and she stands in the kitchen, and she cooks for me.

•   •   •

Y
ears later, after I leave for college in Boston, after my mother marries Ben and moves into Manhattan, Gaga will step out of the building she moved my mother to in 1960, leaving Grandpa Philip to sleep alone in his furniture store in Williamsburg with nothing but Sister Redempta and his homing pigeons for company; Gaga will stand in the middle of The Champs-Élysées Promenade and look up at our apartment in The Marseilles, occupied, after eighteen years, by strangers.

“No one left to cook for,” she says, when she calls me in my dormitory room in Boston. “No one left to eat with. When are you coming home?”

Six months later, at five in the morning, Ben will call my dorm room: “Gaga is gone,” he tells me. A massive heart attack in the middle of the night.

“Don't come—don't even try to get home,” he says as I stand at the window facing west over Commonwealth Avenue. Enormous snowflakes the size of half dollars flutter past me; the wind blows them up and sideways and down; I can't focus on them. Ben's voice is distant, as if he's calling me from another place and time, and I can barely hear him. On that morning, an early April nor'easter—a freak springtime snowstorm—will blanket and shut down the entire East Coast within hours. The trains will stop running and the airports will shut down and the roads will be abandoned. I will never have the chance to say goodbye.

T
he employee dining room—the EDR—at Sugar Maples is long and narrow, like a white clapboard single-wide set upon a cement foundation. It's tucked behind the dining room, between the massive metal walk-in refrigerator that's the size of my bedroom in Forest Hills, and the hotel laundry, with its humming industrial front-loading washers and dryers emitting hot chemical vapors morning and night. When the wind is right, and even when it's not, the stench of souring, cheesy milk spills out through the walk-in's rotting rubber door gaskets, which are disintegrating with age. The peeling EDR doors—wood-framed, double-screened from top to bottom, torn in spots, the desiccated carcasses of ancient flies trapped and rattling between them—swing open and closed all day, with employees going in and out for free cups of industrial coffee that tastes like a metal pipe.

We range in age from sixteen to thirty-one, and we gather at the EDR three times a day; a green plastic transistor radio sits on the windowsill, blaring an endless loop of America and The Allman Brothers and Pure Prairie League. The groundskeepers—we call them the Yardbirds—come in for breakfast first, because they've been doing manual labor since before dawn and are starving. Jim, a guitar-playing redhead with a frizzy short ponytail held in place by a blue bandana, wears round John Lennon glasses and a friendly, dimpled smile. He cups his hands around a chipped Buffalo China mug of weak coffee softened with curdling fake creamer, and sits down at the head of the thirty-foot-long table. Psychopathic Bill—Psycho Bill for short, since the night he took a bite out of a lightbulb—who works in the laundry, is blond, ruddy, and perpetually toasted; for no reason, he flings a plate of powdered scrambled eggs and undercooked, fatty bacon overhand like a Frisbee at gorgeous, leggy Jennifer, who sips her coffee like she's enjoying tea at the Ritz. She is one of three prim, Lilly Pulitzer–clad sorority girls who have come up from New Orleans to work as guest liaisons, and who will not survive the summer. Eric, the nephew of a well-known NFL running back, lives in town and is the only black kid in the entire county; shy, soft-spoken, and so handsome that people gasp when they see him, he makes a breakfast plate for himself—eggs, bacon, toast, sausage of unknown provenance—and sits down directly across from me, looking up every few minutes to smile.

Emma, who works with me in the snack shack, is from Shaker Heights and attends Exeter. Sixteen, anorexic, dressed in three-sizes-too-big white Smith overalls over a tight tank top revealing
a thatch of mahogany fur nestled in the crook of each armpit, her masses of long brown hair stuffed into a tweed newsboy cap like magic snakes into a trick beer can, she plants herself next to me as I drink my first cup of sweet black coffee. She scoots over close, in a cloud of sweat and patchouli; she links arms with me while I try to eat, and her touch sends a shock wave of electricity through my body and into my hand that nearly makes me drop the piece of incinerated toast I'm chewing on. She gives me an affectionate peck on the cheek and touches the small of my back, and my heart cracks open like an uncooked egg.

I feel mild numbness when I break two fingers on Camp Towanda's field hockey pitch and when I blow out my knee on an icy Vermont ski slope. I feel a leaden deadness at my core when Buck slips me away to the verdant depths of Kissena Park among the mugwort and the bittersweet, on the days he's supposed to be tutoring me in math, or when my father issues a brief, violent beating in the basement of the Tung Shing House, outside the ladies' room. But on this morning, with Emma's hand on my back and the clang of used plates dropping into the rubber washtub in the kitchen, my stomach turns over and every cell in my body pulses with an unknowable, alien electricity that leaves the taste of shame in my mouth, like bile. Tears burn my eyes; I suck down my coffee to hold them off.

“G'morning, babycakes,” Steve bends down and whispers in my other ear, stretching his long legs beneath the table. He is a beanpole, with straight, sun-dappled hair the color of straw and bright cornflower blue eyes. This morning, he's made two plates for himself, piled high with eggs, bacon, slices of buttered, immolated toast,
and fried potatoes; he balances it all plus two glasses of whole milk plus a can of warm Coke that he's liberated from the bar near the lobby. Steve works wherever he's needed at the hotel: as a stand-in waiter in the dining hall, a painter, a mechanic, a camp counselor for the young children of guests, an archery instructor who will, on a dare, shoot out the tires on the hotel laundry truck, a busboy, a mail sorter, a housekeeper, a line cook, a dishwasher. He's in perpetual, constant motion; he's loud and brash and hilarious, and he doesn't give a shit. I'm the new girl, the one in the Lacoste shirts and the leather Tretorns, a conquest he'll never have to see again after the summer; Steve follows me around like a stray dog. And so does Emma, who floats from guys, including Steve, to girls, and back again, with all the fluidity of a river. I'm unaccustomed to the attention, which makes me feel naked; for the very first time in my life, I relish it.

Jim the Yardbird drains his coffee cup, gets up to leave, and playfully ruffles my hair as he walks past me.

“Have a good day, kiddos,” he says. I look up at him standing behind me, and I smile.

“So what's happening today?” Steve asks, shoveling eggs into his mouth by the soup spoonful.

“The snack shack from nine to five,” I say. “And my father is coming up. It's Friday.”

“So does this mean I can come by for an afternoon snack before Daddy arrives?” He puckers his lips and squinches his eyes tight.

“For God's sake, you are so completely gross,” Emma says.
She pulls her hat off and whacks him over the head. He swoons and bats his eyelashes at her.

“You love me, Em—admit it.”

“Shut
up
, Steve—I do not.”

“Do too,” he answers, puckering up, this time at Emma, who stands up and storms out of the EDR, slamming the screen door behind her.

There is no camp counselor, no manager, no parent, no boss, no babysitter, no caregiver, no person of authority to stop the banter and the food fights and the teasing.

When I call home, my mother doesn't ask me if I'm having a good time, or what the weather is like, or what I'm eating.

“Do they know you're Jewish?” she wants to know, and I don't—I can't—answer. Whoever or whatever I am, for the first time in my life, appears to make no difference. At Sugar Maples, we work together, we talk together, we eat together, we fight together, we get drunk together, we smoke pot together, we nap together like a pile of puppies in the employee living quarters just above the lobby. Open any door during any break, and there, passed out across a bed, will be two, three, four of us, sleeping like exhausted toddlers. By summer's end, I will lose my virginity on the linoleum back-room floor of the snack shack during a mountain rainstorm to a blond, lanky boy in a
Keep On Truckin'
T-shirt, with
Amie, what you wanna do?
thrumming in the background. Steve is kind and clumsy and mostly gentle, fumbling with the single, lone Trojan that his Marine brother gave him, and that he's been carrying around in his wallet all summer. It happens quickly; we both dream of Emma.

•   •   •

T
here are a few dates: one-offs with attractive women, all lanky and svelte like my mother, all of them Gentile, as though my father is taunting Grandpa Henry all the way to the grave. There is Betsy McDouglass, a dark-haired commercial accountant from Albuquerque, who comes to New York once a month to see clients. Grace Falk, a black leather–jacketed museum administrator, drags my father, dressed in his Brooks Brothers costume, to hear Lou Reed and John Cale at The Kitchen. He vows to never see her again, except
the sex is so good.

“Shit, Dad, I don't need to hear this,” I groan.

We are eating racks of marinated, dripping baby back ribs at O'Lunney's, a sticky-floored Irish bar in midtown Manhattan, where we've gone to hear Country Gazette. My friends are listening to Blondie and The Clash and Cheap Trick, and I'm in love with Christian bluegrass, and the band sings Louvin Brothers songs about Jesus and redemption and faith.

“Well, who else am I going to tell it to? Your grandmother?” He pours himself, and then me, a beer from a scuffed plastic pitcher that has just landed on our table.

“You're going to have to find someone else to talk to,” I say, “because I can't—”

“But aren't you happy for me?” he shouts over the mandolin solo. He looks desperate and red-faced.

“Of course I'm happy for you,” I say, and I am. My parents were rarely affectionate with each other in the best of times, and I knew that their aloofness likely carried over to the bedroom.
But now, I don't want to know, in the way that the
Eight Is Enough
kids didn't want to know that Dick Van Patten was fucking Betty Buckley.

Weeks later, my father takes me along to meet Maureen, an unsmiling, six-foot-tall, trench coat–wearing redhead. We go to The Sign of the Dove for lunch and stare at our pasta primavera in silence, she as uncomfortable as I, while my father makes small talk: Weather. Politics. Ed Koch. Music. Lennon and Hinckley. The three of us walk down to MoMA, where my father buys us tickets to see Fellini's
La città delle donne (City of Women)
. The movie unfurls like a flag, stretching out endlessly in front of us: two hours of explicit sexual conquest, and Marcello Mastroianni. After the first half hour, I bolt out of the theater and sit in the lobby, and I wait for it to end. We never see Maureen again.

“Maybe he's just a serial dater,” I say to Jessica, the front office manager at Sugar Maples. She's a broad, mousy blond woman who wears her hair in a Dutch boy with pleated dirndl skirts and white, ruffly, puffed-sleeve blouses that button to her chin. She's whip-smart, and as warm as a bighearted German hausfrau. Thirty-one, she's recently divorced from a famous drug-addled guitarist whose band played at Woodstock.

Every Friday afternoon at three, Jessica takes a break and comes over to the snack shack for a bottle of Coke, and casually asks me the same question while I wipe down the counter.

“Is your dad bringing anyone up this weekend?”

And every Friday afternoon, I say no. Every Friday, he arrives just as dinner is being served in the main dining hall. I meet him in the lobby, where he hugs me, lifting me off the ground, and then
makes his way to the front desk to check in. Jessica hands him a key: the same room, every time. It takes me three weeks to notice.

My father eats dinner with the owners of the hotel; as an employee, I'm relegated to the EDR, along with Steve, Emma, Jim, Jessica, and two dozen other hotel workers. We sit down together at the same time every evening, and Jim asks us to fold our hands and bow our heads:
Bless this food before us set. It needs all the help that it can get.

Each night, we eat the dregs of the previous night's dining room meal: leftover pork roast reheated to the consistency of shoe leather and warmed under ladlesful of Lucky Boy canned gravy mixed with rosemary-scented melted pork fat; leftover roast beef that reappears as quasi-Salisbury steak, chopped and pounded into meaty Frisbees; leftover roast chicken ground and molded into croquettes that get deep-fried in ages-old oil that smells like trout. On every table sit two pitchers: one contains lukewarm water tasting of rusting pipes, the other, whole milk.

“Gotta go,” Jessica says, as we drop our plates into the wash bin. Before everyone is done and reconvening for that night's activities—poker in someone's room; piling into someone's car to go hear Jim's band play at Channings, a nearby pub in town that ignores underage patrons—Jessica takes off for the hotel bar, where my father is reading
The New York Times
and nursing a Gibson.

•   •   •

T
here are no restaurants in the immediate vicinity of Sugar Maples. So when Steve decides that we all need to go out for a meal—“a formal, sit-down, grown-up dinner, with real
silverware,” he announces—on my last night at the hotel, our options are limited: there's Vesuvius, a small red-sauce Italian-style place in nearby Hensonville that my father has taken me to a few times over the summer.

“Forget it,” Steve says, shaking his head. “They know my parents.”

We're sitting in the empty snack shack on a rainy late August Friday afternoon; Emma mops the linoleum back-room floor while Steve and I sit at one of the front tables with two massive stacks of cold cuts, a thick sheaf of white deli paper cut into six-inch squares, and a scale. I separate the meat and cheese into three-ounce packages for sandwiches with coy names like Ham and Cheese Wouldya Please, which is ham and cheese on rye, and Little Orphan Hammy, which is ham on white, no cheese, no mayo, no mustard. When a guest wants more meat or cheese on his sandwich, I have to charge him more, per slice. The ham—it is not technically Black Forest or honey-roasted but rather just plain ham—comes mechanically formed and shrink-wrapped into the shape of a shoebox. I spend hours running it through the whirring metal slicing machine and stacking it; the two-foot-high tower of boiled, pressed meat reminds me of the Danish stuff Inga used to serve to my mother in Forest Hills, back before she and Eddie, Tor, and George moved. While I'm weighing the ham, I think of Gaga at home in her apartment, watching the Yankees, and Grandma Bertha in Brooklyn, cleaning the kitchen and getting ready to light her Shabbos candles, and a wave of guilt knocks the wind out of me.