South Pole Station

October 15, 2003

Bonnie says it is acceptable to bake in quantity and freeze items after they have been double-wrapped and dated. This is bullshit. She says “acceptable” but she means “required.” I don’t freeze my pastries. It does a disservice to me, to the pastries, and to anyone who tries to choke them down. Plus, the freezers smell like fish. Trying to figure out a non-confrontational way to handle this—too early in the season for a fight over breakfast foods. I plan on bringing up the oatmeal issue soon, though. It’s pretty low-stakes. A little seasoning, cinnamon and nutmeg, maybe, or even a couple teaspoons of vanilla or almond extract—hell, even a dash of salsa—could go a long way.

Between meals, Pearl had to make the rounds of the storage units, recording temps and noting stock levels. The units outside of the galley trailer, in dark corners of the Dome, were the worst—the air was as cold there as it was outside. The giant freezer where they stored the meat products actually had to be heated. As she scanned the shelves, Pearl marveled at the quantities required for every meal. Thirty pounds of orange roughy for fish and chips. Nothing less than twenty-eight pounds of ground beef for Texas Tamale Pie. Grilled Reuben called for twenty pounds of corned beef, and the veggie Reuben needed five pounds of tempeh. Pearl glanced down at the monthly menus on the clipboard—it was like an endless repetition of the same twelve meals. She knew she could do better than polenta pie and fucking tofu nut balls.

Pearl thought the station greenhouse was a nice touch, though. It was a steaming shoe box set atop the stairs on the annex berthing building. When Pearl opened the door, she had to break about fifty pounds of suction force, but once she did, she was treated to the smell of soil and green things, smells that Pearl had already forgotten—earth, compost, ripe melon.

October 19, 2003

I told Kit I’d take over greenhouse duty and he looked like he wanted to kiss me. The greenhouse will be the key to my success. That and getting rid of the cookbooks.

Personas, not personalities, were important at Pole, so Pearl settled on being a flaxen-haired scrub with a penchant for pink bandannas and self-deprecating jokes. Her requisite edge came from her undercut, which she kept up using a pink Bic twice a week, an operation that required two mirrors and an hour of her precious time. She was a small woman with what Sal had called the “face of a Pilgrim.” The scar above her right eyebrow—courtesy of a two-hook herring rig—suggested the correct amount of toughness and allowed her to affect kindness, solicitude, even motherliness, without losing credibility. She took up knitting again, and her wares became quite popular. She knit during Movie Night, she knit at the Smoke Bar, she knit during the station lectures. The station was clearly in need of a Goody Two-Shoes. Pearl could be that Goody Two-Shoes. She could be whatever she wanted.

Meanwhile, she continued her quest to run the kitchen, which included feigning respect for the VIDS bureaucracy. But it wasn’t until the two Swedes came through the lunch line that Pearl realized the bureaucracy could help speed Bonnie’s exit. As soon as the Swedes showed up in the galley, Simon had had his eye on them.

“I’m sorry, but station rules prohibit us from serving you meals paid for by American taxpayers,” Simon told the Swedes. “If you have foodstuffs you’d like to cook in our kitchen, you are by all means welcome to do so after the kitchen has closed.”

“It’s okay, Simon,” Pearl said, “I have no problem giving them some food.”

“That’s very kind, Pearl, but that’s against protocol.”

“I’ll give them my meal—they can split it.”

“Again, that’s kind and selfless, but simply not possible.”

The Swedes smiled at her and set their trays down. Pearl had turned away in time to catch Bonnie searching the bookshelves for Enchanted Broccoli Forest. She watched as Bonnie’s fingers danced from spine to spine and back again.

Soon, lunch drew to a close, which meant it was time to stack the dirty trays on a dolly. Cooper approached Pearl with her tray, and asked about the Swedes. She wanted to ferry some food out to them. It took Pearl a minute to see the possibilities of such an operation—it wasn’t until Cooper mentioned the expired ramen that it hit her. Pearl could facilitate this breach of “protocol,” but as head of the kitchen, Bonnie would get the blame.

“Let me get the okay from Bonnie on this,” Pearl told Cooper. She walked to the back of the galley, past Kit, who was going through boxes, looking for the missing cookbooks, all the way to the back door. She stood there for a respectable amount of time, then returned to the caf line, where Cooper stood waiting.

“She says it’s okay,” Pearl said.

*

October 28, 2003

Bonnie got called in by HR yesterday. They said she’d violated protocols by authorizing the delivery of station food to the Swedes camping out on the plateau. She denied it, of course, blamed it all on Cooper. Cooper won’t talk, thinks she’s protecting me. VIDS can’t do anything about her—she’s NSF—so they wrote Bonnie up. Bonnie told Kit and me that it was the first violation on her record, ever. Still hasn’t mentioned the missing cookbooks to me, though. I plan on dissembling the three-ring binder (SP) tonight. There’s nothing of value in it anyway. I volunteered to take the Midrats shift from Bonnie. She seemed surprised and actually thanked me. She told me the swing shift gets harder on her as she gets older.

One day, Bonnie mentioned that Marcy had called an all-women’s meeting in the library.

“What’s it for?” Pearl asked, as she prepped for lunch.

“Seasonal Staking of Claims,” Bonnie replied, whipping a vat of minestrone into a ruby froth. Her greasy dark hair had escaped from her hairnet and was plastered to her forehead.

“What claims are we staking?” Pearl asked.

“It’s how we parse out who’s hooked up, who isn’t, and who’s fair game. It gets hairy when somebody steals someone else’s man ’cause she didn’t know there was a claim.”

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