South Pole Station

Still Life with Menu was the second.

Pearl wasn’t sure if Still Life would be missed, but she knew Enchanted Broccoli Forest would. It was a go-to. Vegetarians sometimes requested EBF-specific dishes. But a week had passed, and still Bonnie said nothing about the missing cookbooks. Pearl couldn’t have known that Bonnie would lose the kitchen over the inedible Carrot-Mushroom Loaf from Moosewood Cooks for a Crowd. She only knew Bonnie would lose the kitchen eventually. It was why Pearl had agreed to take the job in the first place.

No one knew that Pearl had been waiting for a Carrot-Mushroom Loaf moment since she landed at South Pole in late September. She’d been hired as production cook, the junior position to Bonnie’s head cook. Pearl had applied for the top position, of course; she hadn’t spent ten miserable years in various eateries and ship’s galleys to become second fiddle in an institutional kitchen. (Nor did she go to Antarctica to become Alice Waters, but you had to pay the bills and government work paid well, especially when room and board was free).

But Bonnie was a lifer; and after a certain number of years on the ice, lifers received the privilege of turning jobs down rather than having to reapply for them. Bonnie would never turn down a job at Pole, and it took only a couple of days on the ice for Pearl to understand that the woman would not be easily overthrown. She had allies. Those allies were other lifers, and they’d lost their taste for edible food some years earlier. Calling Bonnie to account for the state of the food at Pole wasn’t going to be an effective strategy. The operation would have to be subtler than that, requiring the actions of a person exhibiting the traits of monomania. Not all of the traits, of course—that kind of psychological profile would be peremptorily red-flagged by the VIDS team. Just a few of them.

“Can you focus obsessively on a single thing?” Tucker had asked Pearl back in Denver after the psych exam. “Can you be insane when it comes to this single thing—improving the food—and be rational about everything else?”

“What do my results say?”

“That’s why you’re in my office.”

“Then you already know the answer.”

Pearl had arrived at Pole in the midst of an overhaul—a new station was being built just hundreds of yards from the current one. The National Science Foundation had been soliciting and rejecting plans for a new geodesic dome for years. Six months before Pearl came to Pole, they’d finally approved a plan. It was a matter of some irony that the firm that had won the design contract was based in Honolulu.

One of the modules under construction would house the new galley with what Tucker had promised Pearl would be state-of-the-art appliances, stainless-steel prep tables, and more capacity—however, it wouldn’t open until next season. The kitchen in which she’d be working this season—the old kitchen—would present challenges. The galley on the Icelandic herring boat she’d crewed the summer after high school had been better equipped.

September 30, 2003

Perhaps the cramped conditions are what killed Bonnie’s creativity. Or maybe it’s the six-packs she puts away at the Smoke Bar every night. We’ll see. There’s a galley staff meeting tonight to go over the season’s menu. I’ll observe and say nothing.

By the time Pearl was aproned up and scrubbing her nails for the first meal of the season, she had only seen Bonnie a couple of times since that trust-building exercise back in Denver. Bonnie had come into training hot. She was pissed. Pissed that she’d had to go through fire school again, and even more pissed that she’d have to deal with a Fingy production cook. Her previous production cook had left for the cruise ship circuit, and Pearl sensed that the parting had not been amicable. The trust-building exercise had done little to improve Bonnie’s outlook on the season to come. Granted, the “trust facilitator” contracted by VIDS had made a poor choice when he’d picked the “eye contact with touch” exercise. Pearl and Bonnie stood across from one another in the meadow adjacent to the fire school, eyes locked, hands clasped. But Pearl saw the pride in Bonnie’s angry eyes. Pride was easily exploited.

March 12, 2003, at training

Met her today. Big woman—my height but weighing in at about two bills. Wouldn’t tell me anything about what to expect, says all “Fingys” have to fend for themselves. Wouldn’t tell me what Fingy means either. She hates my undercut, said it was “punk, fifteen years late.” I’m trying to be friendly, but she’s not having it.

The first days in the galley were like any of the first days Pearl had spent in a new kitchen, be it on land or at sea—getting used to her surroundings, examining the supply lists, memorizing her duties, and getting to know her co-workers. Kit, a skinny guy with lank brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, was the main DA—the dining assistant who was responsible for everything from cleaning tables and filling the milk machine to stocking the napkin dispensers. As head cook, it was Bonnie’s job to write up the menus and manage all kitchen operations.

“Bonnie is a loner by nature,” Tucker told Pearl the first week in. “Being at Pole goes against every fiber of her being.”

“I thought Pole was like the loner’s Disney World.”

Tucker shook his head. “You have to at least possess the capacity to enjoy the company of other loners.”

“Then why is she there?”

“Dwight, our comms tech. They met at a Sheraton in New Orleans. He was the IT guy, she was buffet cook.”

“She followed a guy down here?”

“It’s not all that uncommon. Like two negative electrons, two misanthropes can bind together with the force of—”

“Negative electrons repel each other,” Pearl said.

Tucker paused. “Huh. Well, that explains why Sal Brennan has banned me from the Dark Sector.”

Her days began with a 4:30 a.m. alarm. The sun shone as brightly then as it did at noon, which made getting up fairly easy. She’d make her way from her room in the elevated dormitory under the Dome (the galley staff received superior accommodations) to the kitchen, where she’d prepare hot breakfast for 105 people and put her proofed pastry and bread dough in the oven.

At first, Pearl adhered slavishly to Bonnie’s menu. Huge warming trays filled with bright yellow scrambled eggs, vats of gluey oatmeal, white and wheat bread. The Polies seemed unperturbed by the monotony, although Pearl did notice that those who took oatmeal loaded their bowls with raisins, brown sugar, and nuts, as if trying to bury it under an avalanche of condiments. One guy even used salsa.

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