Black Ice (20 page)

I opened the big lever to the middle freezer and stepped in. Plastic packages of meat were stored on shelves. On the floor were boxes, as big as moving boxes, filled with little containers of half-and-half, butter, French fries, and vegetables. I browsed the freezer quickly, as if it were a dictionary that I had opened
to look up a word, only to find a delicious storehouse of other words waiting to be read. Then the door closed behind me.

I did not turn around until I convinced myself that there must be a lever on the inside. Surely, freezers were made that way. They had to be. Doors bumped closed by accident all the time, I thought, and the freezer companies couldn’t pay the damages that would be filed by families of suffocated workers. I breathed deeply of the frosty, food-laden air. It smelled of meat and frozen blood. When I turned, the cook was standing behind me.

“I was wondering when you’d look around,” he said.

“Open the door.”

“You got your butter yet? Don’t look like you got what you came here for.”

I reached into the box and picked up a few pounds of butter.

“That’s not going to be enough,” he said.

I knew it was not enough, but I wanted to have one hand free.

“I’ll get more later.”

“I didn’t get what I came for, either,” he said. He moved the toothpick in his mouth from one side to another, and then took it out. “You scared?”

“Just let me out. I got tables waiting. I got money to make.”

“You ain’t making no money here. This here is chump change. You
could
make some money if you put your mind to it.” He grinned.

“You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to walk past you, and then I’m going to open that lever, and I’m going to act like this has all been some kind of joke. So far, it’s a joke.”

“Don’t threaten me.”

“I’m going to scream now.”

He laughed. “Go ahead.”

It was obvious that no one would be able to hear me.

“They’re going to be missing us.”

“Ain’t nobody missing nobody. All they’re doing is running around simple like they always do.”

He reached out and grabbed my arm. I watched his face. I watched where the sweat had stopped dripping and had cooled on his head, nearly bald, but covered with a fine growth of slick, black hair. He was much taller than I, and he liked to roll up the short sleeves of his white T-shirt to reveal his knotted biceps. I watched his face, because I knew that I could keep the panic out of my eyes. I waited for him to move again, gambling that I’d be faster than he, that I could throw myself against the lever and shout over the kitchen din.

He held my arm so hard that I dared not move it and expose my comparative weakness. He put his other hand on my face and swept it down my body. I wanted to hurt him. I would wait, and I would hurt him somehow.

“Let me go.”

“You too good?”

“Get your motherfuckin’ hands off of me.”

“Don’t talk like that.” He gave my torso another squeeze and opened the door. “You got a nasty mouth sometimes,” he said, holding the door ajar. “You’d better just make sure to keep it closed.”

I couldn’t talk when I got out of the freezer. All I could do was put the butter out, pick up my plates, and serve my customers. I couldn’t even talk to the other waitresses.

When my shift finished, my father came to get me. I drove the car badly. I stalled three times trying to get into first gear and crest a hill at a stoplight. My father told me about his experience stalling out once when a police car was behind him. I listened to the story he had told me before, and I soaked up the safety of being in the car with him.

The next day I arrived at work early and spoke to the manager.
He was a sloppy older man with a belly that oozed like lemon curd over his belt. He tasted each dish every morning. By noon, the corners of his mouth and his nubby short-sleeve shirts were stained with the day’s specials. He looked worried as I told him about the cook who had trapped me in the freezer, and I knew he was worried about having to do or say anything that might upset the cook. He, too, was afraid of the man, and I knew from experience that he hated to hire new people. He told me to watch myself, and to make sure that I did not provoke the cooks. There had been only one other black waitress at the Hearthglow Diner, he said, and she hadn’t worked out, but “you’re doing good,” he said. “We like you.”

I waited through the day for his bosses to come in. They were an Italian couple, a big, fatherly man named Jerry and a tiny, sharp-faced beauty who wore long dresses and acted as the hostess for the fancy DeVille side of the restaurant. It was the wife who chided us and insisted that we hem our dresses so high that none of us could bend over to wipe a table properly. But it was Jerry who came up with practical solutions to the daily whining and squabbling. He switched day schedules for a woman who needed to take care of a sick child. He moved the toaster to a separate table so that there would be enough room for us to work during the breakfast rush.

I found a way to get Jerry alone. He looked at me with his face troubled, annoyed, and sympathetic. He asked me whether the cook and I had ever dated. He asked me whether or not I had messed around with any of the other men. I did not feel indignant when he asked me these questions, so intent was I on telling my story and making him listen. I answered no solemnly to his questions and swore allegiance to my boyfriend (who I said was in college).

The next day the broiler man was fired. No one in the kitchen
spoke about it. No one switched my orders. No one spoke one word more to me than necessary. In a few days the waitresses began to ask me questions. I answered them honestly, but briefly. Then one day, when we were particularly busy, and two kitchen helpers had called in sick, Booker cursed at a new woman (she didn’t last long) who had made a mistake. He took the plate of food he had prepared according to her check, but that she now wanted changed, and he threw it in the garbage. “Now I tell you what you do. You go over there and write it like you want it, and then you put your check right here at the end of the line and wait for it, just like everybody had to wait while you were in here fucking up the program.

“Shit!” he said to no one in particular as he grabbed the next check. “I’m burning the fuck up back here. Got no help whatsoever. Fifty pounds of rotten potatoes stinking me out. She’s in and out like to drive a man crazy, and I can’t even sit down for a drink of water.”

I poured a large glass of soda and ice as I had seen Elaine do, and reached over the steam table to put it on the cutting board. Booker turned around in time to see me, and he took the glass from my hand. He drank the entire glass down noisily, and stood for a moment with his head tipped back.

“Why’d you get the man fired?” he said, looking up at the ceiling.

“He got himself fired. I didn’t get him fired.”

“Nah, don’t give me that. You went in there and talked to the Man.”

“So I talked to him.”

“Hey, well, check it out. The man’s gone, ain’t he? He was only playin’ around.”

“No, Booker.
You
play around. He wasn’t playing. Do you go around locking people in freezers?”

“Hell, no, and I guess, from the looks of things around here, I better not start or I’ll be out of a job.” He laughed to himself. “He was an evil brother anyway. Hey,” he called as I turned to go. “You can do that—” he said pointing to the empty glass—“whenever you like.” For a brief moment, he grinned, with no irony, mischief, sarcasm, or boredom. He looked at his checks and moved mine to the front of the line.

“Oh, Booker,” I said, “don’t do that.”

“Why not?” he asked. “I’ve moved it to the back plenty enough.”

I visited Ricky that summer in Schenectady. I met his family. We took the usual photos. I played with his younger brothers and talked to his mother, who welcomed me warmly and made us banana pudding for dessert.

Ricky and I had the familiar tussle about sex. He gave me instructions to leave the door to his brother’s room unlocked, and I insisted that I did not want to be sneaking around in his parents’ house at night. We visited Niagara Falls and climbed to the top of the hill over the falls. There Ricky gave me a tiny diamond pendant necklace. He asked me to marry him, and I agreed, but all I could think about was that somewhere in his neighborhood, somewhere in the store where his mother shopped, a young woman was buying diapers while we planned smugly for medical school. Somewhere in the park where he wanted to kiss and I let him, because there seemed no way not to, a girl my age would be rolling a stroller while I was filling out my applications to a careful selection of Ivies.

I returned home dispirited by my lack of integrity. I had no intention of marrying Ricky; I had no intention of dating him anymore, but I had not had the guts to tell myself while I was
there in Schenectady eating his mother’s banana pudding, and I’d certainly not had the guts to tell him. Soon after I got home I threw the pendant into the trashcan.

“Oh, my Lord. Well, I guess that one’s over,” my mother said. She fished the pendant out of the trashcan and told me there was no need to take my anger out on a harmless little diamond.

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“Well, you can keep it. It’s just a piece of jewelry.”

“It’s not a piece of jewelry. It’s an engagement necklace. It’s like those rings they put around pigeons’ legs to identify them.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, it’s just a necklace. Where do you get that kind of talk? It’s a perfectly lovely little necklace.”

“I don’t want it. And I don’t want these around.” On the kitchen counter was a double frame with the pictures that Ricky and I had taken of each other on that first, fateful weekend at St. Paul’s. He had sent the framed photos to my mother for Mother’s Day—a far more impressive present than I had sent her myself.

“Now wait a minute, wait a minute,” my mother said, laughing. “Just because you’re through with that boy doesn’t mean you have the right to go throwing away my pictures. If you don’t want the necklace, fine.
I’ll
wear it. It’s cute. But I can’t just change up in an instant. You bring the boy here, and tell me this is it, he’s the one. You get me to love him, too, and then a few months later, you’re through and I’m hurt.”

I told her about the girl in Schenectady who’d had his child. I told her that he’d called her a whore.

“Well, now, that’s a shame,” my mother said. “You just can’t tell, can you? Seems like you just can’t trust ’em sometimes, doesn’t it?”

In time she moved the pictures upstairs to the third floor.

Soon after, as if he had radar to detect it, Booker asked me how my “college boy” was doing.

“All right,” I said as I loaded my arm with plates and pivoted toward the swinging door. I placed my heel on the threshold with my foot at a forty-five-degree angle to the door as I had a thousand times before, and pressed my foot down against the door to flip it open. For the first time since the beginning of the summer, I slipped. My old-lady shoes with the built-in arch supports, on which I had spent fifty of my waitressing dollars—I had never imagined that shoes so ugly could cost so much—were slick on the bottom from a spot of grease on the floor. I recovered myself, but just barely, and as I lunged through the door, I heard the calls behind me for a mop.

I stayed out on the floor a long time, since all my customers, it seemed, had come in at the same time, and all of them needed their orders taken at once. When I came back in with my several checks, I was ready with a line of patter. The fact was that Booker hated to read, but he could keep a restaurant full of orders in his head. Usually when he saw us lining up several orders at once, he’d shout: “Talk to me.”

This time he did not, so I began, “I’m ordering: This looks like a bunch, but they’re all nice and easy.…” Then I told him what the customers had ordered in the order in which I wanted to receive the food. Uncharacteristically, Booker said nothing. When I came back to pick up the plates, he asked me whether or not I would like to go out with him that weekend on a night we both had off. Each of us was surprised when I said yes.

My mother understood more quickly than I that I wanted a date, a normal, local, friendly, working-class date. I disputed, almost by reflex, that my date with Booker had anything to do with my unilateral breakup with Ricky. She smiled her crooked
smile. Then she asked me how old Booker was and told me that I still had to be home by midnight, prep school or no prep school. My father, who seldom had anything to say about my boyfriends, made it clear that he did not approve. I could not figure out why.

Booker did not have a car, and I was not allowed, by state or family law, to drive at night, so we arranged our dates according to the schedule of the bus to Philadelphia.

Once he took me to a card game in a house in West Philly. We proceeded through the first floor, through small groups of watchful people, to the basement, where the game was in progress. Booker played poker. I watched and helped him bet. At some point in the evening, someone pulled a gun and put it back again. We left soon afterward to find safer amusement and ended up at a bar downtown.

“I don’t want to get carded,” I said at the doorway.

Booker scanned my face and body with his small, quick eyes. I was sixteen, and I felt it. I had told him and everyone at work that I was eighteen. The drinking age in Pennsylvania was twenty-one.

“You won’t get carded,” Booker said. “Besides, you don’t have to worry about nothin’. You’re with Booker.”

Men, I was discovering, had a habit of saying such things, as if their saying them made them so. I laughed at him, and he took my laughter—with what feelings I do not know. I did know, however, that I had a ten-dollar bill shoved in my bra, as my mother advised. “Take your carfare. No matter who you’re with, take your carfare—and a dime.” Since I had no pockets, the dime rested in my shoe. I felt it slip underneath my toes as we stepped into the portal.

At the bar, Booker remarked on how short I was sitting down. He was six feet tall and long-waisted. I was five-five and short-waisted. He liked women with long legs, he said. The only problem with them was that you could hardly see
their heads when they sat down at a bar. Booker bantered on. I remember that I did not talk much—he commented on it—because I had so much to do to watch. The bar made me wary.