Esmerelda fished out an orange and lobbed it across the room underhand, a high gentle arc that playfully smacked Lakshmi in the buttocks, dead center. “Need you to go on a quick breakfast run. Couple of Hostess pies and a peanut butter-based confection, whatever’s on sale. You know what I like.”
Lakshmi aimed the twin dots of her pupils back at Esmerelda and picked the orange off the ground. “Can’t do it, Esmerelda.”
“Bull-oney. Always have, always will. Now get going fast before I have to call Slippy.”
Lakshmi looked away from Ezzie and turned on her toes, her left paw windmilling, a tiny kick from her furry legs, the orange released at the top of her rotation and zipping like a laser beam six inches above Esmerelda’s head. A gory splatter moved the room to silence.
“Slipped,” Lakshmi said, and flexed her bicep like a champion powerlifter.
Inside Esmerelda’s head castles crumbled, palaces burned, royal rouge carpets rolled up, the imperial court dispersed. Nothing, she had nothing, she was a beggar headed for street crime, her kingdom a shopping cart loaded with stolen bottles.
She shot out of her cash register station and onto the street, the Gargantuan whizzing at top rpm, veering up the sidewalk until she saw the first store opening up, the corner deli accepting a pallet of Gatorades. She broke for it in a near-blind delirium, zipping within sight of pink-frosted cupcakes on the counter, then felt her spirits shrivel as the Gargantuan’s engine-whir rose, the chair decelerated, puttered, stopped, and rolled backward until she yanked the emergency brake and swiveled around stupidly on a dew-slick manhole. The battery had been drained, clearly an act of sabotage. She heated the morning with scalding profanity and haltingly wheeled the Gargantuan back to the store.
Entrenched in her bunker she hit the phones, ordering delivery from her five most-frequented breakfast joints, all of which regretted to inform her that they’d redrawn their delivery zones such that her office was no longer within range. “Bullshit!” she screamed at the waitress of the pizza shop four doors up the street, “who’s paying you off?” She got the dial tone back but did not mind it—the cool electronic ring provided a baseline of calm, a soothing psychic vanishing point that helped her concentration reset.
She hung up when distress beeps took over the line, putting her head down on her desk and falling into a devil-doused half-sleep fever. It took a line ten-deep of gym-goers, executives, students,
and teachers to rouse her from this daze, caws and cackles slipping from her lips, her stomach squeaking like a chemistry experiment. “Yeah, sorry,” she muttered, typing extra slow and making several uncharacteristic billing errors, drooling a little, her face albino-white, generally appearing as if she’d escaped from the morgue. Impatient from the backed-up line, customers challenged her mistakes, then grew ever more irritated as Esmerelda slogged through the intentionally convoluted refund process aimed at inducing customers into giving up: completing a double-sided form in triplicate and turning four sets of keys simultaneously and inputting a random twenty-digit code that changed on the hour. Ticked-off customers withheld their usual tips and seriously considered moving their work to CopyTown, a rival shop that had opened up down the street a few months back and already established a reputation for runny ink and improper collating and an exploitative billing system riddled with overcharges and hidden fees. But at least service was brisk, and the staff, a set of slim Vietnamese sisters, looked a lot less lame.
Slippy rolled in around eleven, using his briefcase to plow through the steamy line. “What’s the holdup?” he barked. “Ezzie, you’ve got to get it moving. I don’t keep you around because of your charm or good looks. And by the way, something blew up on the wall.” He raised his head and sniffed the aging orange guts. “Have we switched away from Pine-Sol?”
“Give me a cookie,” Esmerelda mewed, then remembering Emily Post added: “please.”
Slippy set his briefcase on the counter, flicked open the latches, and withdrew a wide Tupperware bin. “How about a fruit salad,” he offered.
“So you’re in on it too,” Esmerelda said, grabbing the Tupperware bin and digging in with the pair of serving spoons she kept under her desk. She cleared out the container in fifteen seconds flat, which had the dual effect of rousing her spirits—more from the spirit of victory than satiating her exercise-shrunken hunger—and ruining the appetite of every customer in line.
“Feel better?” Slippy asked.
“No,” Esmerelda growled, though in truth she felt clear-eyed and morning-fresh and at least three months younger.
“You will,” he said. “Come see me in my office in ten minutes.”
Visions of a professional life beyond the cash register station flooded her skull: corner offices and honest-to-god lunch breaks, a bank-busting pay bump, even a shower-enabled bathroom. She went back to work with renewed vigor, and in ten minutes had the roomful of customers on their way with correct change and completed projects in hand, with time left over for a quick run of her industrial hairbrush through her bunned-up hair and a backup application of air freshener.
She made the walk across the office on her own two feet, an intentional display of her newfound independence. “You wanted to see me?” she puffed.
Slippy looked up from his newspaper, swirled the coffee in his silver mug. “Take a seat.” Slippy’s office was outfitted with two low-slung, impossible-to-climb-out-of armchairs and a pair of cheap metal stools set against a sideboard bar where Slippy took his 5 PM vodka. She leaned against the wall instead.
“Right. Well. Esmerelda. I got your packet.” He pulled a manila envelope from the top drawer of his desk and extracted a pile of binder-clipped papers. He flipped through the pages nervously, revealing pie charts and 3-D graphs and inscrutable digits organized into tables. Esmerelda searched his off-brown eyes, newly dimmed and drained of confidence, rewired with a passionless, servile timidity. “Did you print this somewhere else?” he blurted.
She shook her head slowly, a speck of awareness in the swirling recesses of her mind advising her to leave the talking to him.
“Good. Well.” He withdrew a balled handkerchief from his blazer’s inside pocket and passed it over his reddening forehead. “I can’t agree to this.”
She shrugged, but even underinformed she didn’t believe him. He looked like he’d agree to just about anything.
“That kind of money doesn’t just fall into your lap. We’d have to drastically reconfigure our business model. And the mile-stones you set are extremely ambitious. I haven’t seen anything that demonstrates you can accomplish even half of what you promise.”
She met his grasping glance with malaise, dismissal, impatience.
“Now, I’m going along with the plan Robespierre laid out as a favor, to demonstrate my goodwill,” he continued. “I do hope you take that into account. Along with our long history. How I’ve helped you out. Et cetera.” He scanned her empty face for a response. “Well? Say something.”
But she couldn’t even bring herself to shrug.
The phone went off, and he scooped it up on the first ring. “Slippy. Yeah? No, she’s right here. Unh-huh. No. Really. Huh. How much?” A nod too calm to trust. “I see. Yeah. Thanks.”
His hand settling on the switch hook, pointing the handset at her like a gun: “Have you been talking to anyone?”
She walked out without answering, took a seat at her station, and worked the rest of the afternoon with her eyes shut. Even blind she processed orders and handled transactions as speedily as always, every penny and project accounted for, the entire experiment accomplished without a single junk food snack. When she arrived home—the special services van dropped her off at the corner again, now officially the new bus stop, the driver explained—Robespierre was putting the finishing touches on a dinner of broiled salmon and grilled vegetables, and Marat was setting the table. “Guys,” she said calmly, eyeing their industrious behavior suspiciously, and with a heavy dose of regret. “Siddown.”
They sat. “I get the diet and exercise thing,” she said, “and while I don’t like the sneak attack I appreciate the sentiment. It’s not atrocious so far, actually doing it. I’m willing to stick it out for a while, see where it goes.” She palmed her belly, rubbed her fingers over musty fabrics and the familiar scaly softness underneath, this mattress wrapped around her waist, the sheer surface
area of it, how exposed she was. So much to manage, it made living so much work.
“The job’s a different animal. There’s stuff here from way before you were born. You don’t know. And you cannot send me in there naked. I need to be ready, to know where I stand.” She tickled her tummy fast, miming a saxophone scale. “What exactly did you give him? Some papers and charts?”
And something else: “Did you call him today?”
Robespierre got up and left the room, leaving Esmerelda and her son, her red-eyed son, her son who was developing poser dreadlock stubs and smelled like a marijuana dispensary. Taller than she ever was, a fake-feeling maturity forced onto his face. Adult features of bunched skin and trouble-ridden forehead and weak, distrusting eyes. Carrying water, carrying weight. “How’s school?” she asked.
“Fine.” Amazed she never read the mail, or listened to the messages, or showed up for the dozens of one-on-one meetings his guidance counselor claimed to have scheduled.
“You starting up a band?” Lately she’d been hearing a lot of music upstairs, mellow bass beats and men singing out poetry like they were within an inch of death. “Sweet tunes coming out of your room.”
“No,” he said softly, and then she was out of material; she didn’t know what he liked to do or what he was good at, his aspirations and fears, his favorite sport, his can’t-miss TV shows, any girls he was into. She reached for food, found her plate empty, and gnawed on her fingernails with maniacal focus until Robespierre returned with a packet just like the one she’d seen on Slippy’s desk.
“We laid out the case for him,” Robespierre said. “It’s pretty simple. We ran some models projecting how much business you account for, combining your customer retention rate and word-of-mouth referrals. It’s an amazing number, more than half their revenue.” She pushed the packet in her lap. “Mom, you own that place.”
It was a truth she’d always known but had never bothered crunching the numbers on: Slippy’s lifetime of profits had been built on the back of her industry and talent. “Not technically,” she said.
“You’re the fastest cashier in California, no competition. You don’t make mistakes. You’re actually pretty polite to customers. They respect you. And the relationships you have go back decades. You are their one constant. The car that always starts. A problem they never have to think about. That’s power.”
Like being a great chef, Esmerelda thought—Bruce Zoogman’s bankable premium experience. “What’d you ask for?” she wondered.
“Triple your salary and promotion to managing director. A significant equity stake. Rights to own and operate additional branches with the franchise fee waived. Basically, a cut of everything you do best.”
“Enough cash to leave this shithole forever,” Marat said, his breath fragrant with Mendocino kine bud.
“I used to be on top of the world, you know,” she said. “You’ve seen the magazine covers. I could bake my way out of a war zone.”
“Well right now you’re a washed-up nobody with twenty years’ experience in paper products,” Marat responded. “I’ve never seen you so much as reheat a slice of pizza. Seriously, when’s the last time you cooked anything?”
She thought on it hard, no specifics coming to mind. “I think I made some toast back in ’98,” she lied.
“We have to play to your market strengths, Ma,” Robespierre interjected. “You can make a lot of money in copy shop management.”
Esmerelda saw the road and where it went, formal clothes and uncomfortable shoes, long days at a boring manager job, permanent salad crankiness, bodily pains from building up her muscles again, finishing at the gates of a midlevel career she’d never wanted for a second.
Far and away the best option she’d had in her children’s lifetime.
By Friday she’d only cheated on her diet four times—a pizza smuggled into work with a paper delivery, sushi dropped off via the special services van, miniature Butterfingers slipped over as a tip, mail-ordered smoked salmon. Even with those daily dalliances her caloric intake was chopped by 80 percent, translating into an unencumbered aura that sharpened her mind and boosted her spirits and accelerated her foot speed such that she had a statistically significant chance of actually winning a race with any hunchback over eighty. Over the weekend she went shopping with Robespierre, cleaning out all the designer clothes in plus-size clearance bins and picking up several sets of custom-made quintuple-wide heels. Monday she showed up for work styled out like a CEO, slate suit paired with a full-on round of makeup that made her face look serious and organized, even hinting at the remote possibility of sex. “Goddamn, my feet kill,” she muttered, descending into the Gargantuan extra slowly so she wouldn’t snag her new duds on any corners or hooks.
“Talk about extreme makeover,” Lakshmi said, her face falling into surprised mousey piles. “Did you get promoted?”
“Soon,” Esmerelda retorted. “Better keep the fastball on ice.”
All of the early-morning customers noticed Esmerelda’s new uniform, with the professors spouting compliments and the students whistling fatuous catcalls and the executives doling out a professional, curt nod of the head, with the cumulative effect of everyone unconsciously increasing their tips 300 percent. At nine the secretaries reacted with shouts and screams, many clambering around back to hug her and check out her labels, then settling in to discuss how much she’d paid, where she’d shopped, how nicely the colors accented her features and made her seem authoritative and sophisticated. Slippy Sanders nearly dropped his briefcase when he caught a glimpse of her boardroom regalia, and hustled straight to his office without so much as a wave.