Except when the manager asked her what her name was, she panicked and said, “Hazel.”
Everyone called her boss the Big Cheese, but Hazel wanted to be very polite so she tried to treat it like a legal name, with “Cheese” being the surname, and would call her “Ms. Cheese,” which always made her boss give her a very confused look.
“Doesn’t take much to make you uncomfortable, does it?” Ms. Cheese said to her once by the ice machine. Hazel was looking at a roach on the floor that had been stepped on; its barbed leg was doing an end-game twitch. Warm wind and sunshine were coming through the back door as the produce supplier wheeled vegetables in, and Hazel was thinking about how difficult (if not impossible) it was to keep anything contained—how bad and good always join hard together. Hazel nodded; discomfort was her resting state after all, and Ms. Cheese had walked up to the ice machine and looked both ways and said, “I need a little pick-me-up today,” and grabbed the scooper out of the ice machine. She pulled her shirt down and began packing her bra with ice, then handed Hazel the scooper and walked away.
Despite the yelling, Ms. Cheese seemed to like Hazel enough to have designs on fixing her up with her son, who lived in a nearby city but never visited. Hazel tried hard to put these fantasies to rest. “I’m barren,” Hazel lied, “and a lesbian, or maybe even asexual, but if I’m even a little sexual it’s lesbian, and I’m a practitioner of a radical religion that the government thinks is a cult.” “Well, you might not have tons in common,” Ms. Cheese said, “but I could see it working.”
The steam of the kitchen felt like a form of amnesia, which Hazel liked. She decided she’d recommend working in a restaurant to anyone who was trying to forget everything they’d ever done. All that mattered were the orders, up and out and to-go. Unless she screwed up, it was a near-invisible job—not once did someone picking up an order stop and say, Who placed these fries inside this Styrofoam container? Could I meet that person? Is that possible?—and even if she did screw up, it just meant Ms. Cheese coming back and yelling at her. “I should make you go out and apologize,” she’d say, “but that wouldn’t work because you look so downtrodden. Our wronged customers would end up apologizing to you instead, probably taking the change out of their pockets and giving you any extra money they had and feeling bad about themselves for complaining. ‘Don’t go in there,’ they’d start telling other people, pointing to our diner. ‘They screwed up the toppings on my hamburger order, then when I said something, the saddest woman in the world got trotted out from the back. Something in this lady’s eyes conveys the expression of an actress starring in a commercial for intestinal discomfort medication, the prescription kind, a woman who’s clenching her jaw and gripping her abdomen. When she is making no expression at all, that is still what you see when she looks at you. I went in for lunch and left with a mantle of guilt and gravid unease. Try the pizza joint across the street.’”
But that pizza, Hazel pointed out, really was not that good. “You eat it all the time, don’t you?” Ms. Cheese countered. Hazel could only nod. It was still pizza.
Ms. Cheese sighed and kicked a large yellow trash bucket labeled FOOD WASTE ONLY. It rolled a few inches on its tiny wheels. Hazel didn’t understand how the wheels on this receptacle could be so little. They were a real win for the small guys. “Melted cheese is a culinary veil,” Ms. Cheese said, stepping up to the waste bucket again. “A foxhole where mediocrity can hide.” She gave it another kick and a piece of onion skin lifted into the air and floated down to the tile floor right near the drain grate. They both paused to stare at it because it seemed as if it could also be the shed husk of their collective disappointment, something to ponder and mourn.
It reminded Hazel of a tarantula molt display she’d seen once at a natural history museum. The tarantula skins had a disconcerting tempura look about them. They provided no spiritual reassurance. She’d stood in front of the informational tablet that gave a description of the molting process and read and reread it for hours, and become very sad, because it felt like an apt psychic was reading her fortune. Not just her own, but every living thing’s. Molting was not easy—the spider didn’t eat for weeks and seemed mainly dead and its leg joints began weeping fluid and its stomach went bald. The psychic stress was incredible. Interrupt a tarantula during the molting process and it could die. Afterward its new skin is temporarily so vulnerable that the very insects it consumes, like crickets, can injure it.
The silver lining is that if the spider is missing a leg, the leg can grow back. It will be a smaller, less-functional leg, a sort of spare-tire doughnut situation, but a true second chance.
Hazel wondered if molting, which was kind of like giving birth to your self, was more painful than giving birth in the regular way. She remembered her mother telling her how during labor she wanted to die. The pain was that intense. “And I’m no cream puff,” her mother reminded her. “That is next level. I kept telling your father to go home and get his gun and shoot me in the head, right between the eyes; I was grabbing his hand and putting his finger on my forehead just so, screaming, ‘Here! Here! This is where the bullet goes! Straight into the brain!’ And of course the only gun he has is an antique from his grandpa; no ammo at all, doesn’t even fire; he felt the need to tell me all this instead of getting the staff to hurry it up with the epidural.”