Mise En Place

I have been trying to articulate why being at work was when we were most like family. Why when we got home, our lives stopped overlapping. Trees that crowded the backroads turned spritely green and froze over again, and on particularly windy nights, we had to take the long route, martyred branches sheathing our way home. With you, everything has a reason. 

          Year after year, in your blue toyota, we took the winding roads too fast, imagining a world where we lived in one of the mammoth mansions that lined the lake. When I set the table, it was with a sense of pride. I knew, despite common sense, that the fork goes on the left and the knife goes on the right. We’ve discussed the incongruousness of this many times on the way from our house to the restaurant. 

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I was nine when you first taught me what belonged where. There was a formula: placemat, creased paper napkin, utensils, vessel for accompanying liquidation at four settings. We did this every night. At the time, trivets were of the essence. We brought everything to the table: starch, veg, salad dressing, salt and pepper, a green glass bottle for you. 

          I took the tops off for you. I collected the shiny omens and made them into a coaster with syrupy hot glue. The near-boiling bonding agent coated my fingertips with a slight sting, and I took great satisfaction in peeling it off. I gave you the coaster for Christmas. I wondered if it was proof that we weren’t really strangers. 

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Our nightly congregate was a gamble, as if there were landmines in the mashed potatoes. One wrong bite and a fork flew above your grandfather’s handmade napkin holder. We could never hold it together: my sister’s bouts of teary frustration, my mother’s insistence that we pray before taking a bite. 

          With our mutual aging, we stopped bringing food to the table. We left everything in the kitchen, so that the cleanup was more streamlined. Shared meals got quicker and more explosive. I ripped my hair out between soggy gasps for air, and you told me it was bad etiquette. 

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At the restaurant it was different. Behind the line, we made efficiency out of the chaos, in all of its familiar and familial forms. Sometimes, I am afraid that I am destined to your same fate: to be pouring myself into strangers' hungry pleasures for the rest of my life. Or maybe, I am more afraid of what happens if I stop. What do we talk about if not mise en place and meat temperatures and sushi mats? 

          The summer after high school, a mistake was death. I could hear the sound of the ticket machine printing morse code into my dreams. When I am out to eat, I have to stop myself from standing at attention when I hear a bell from the kitchen. It was all “you should know better.” I knew what you taught me: how to grill a burger to a mouth-watering medium rare while keeping the sweat drips from my forehead contained by a tight bandana. 

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We ran the soft-shell crab special in July. We held them over the sink with latex-peppered hands and sunk into their faces with dull scissors. I tried to keep track of all the casualties, but I lost count. All the ruined eyes looked up at me, massacred and blank and unforgiving in their stainless steel limbo. The bartender filled a plastic quart container with soapy beer from the tap. We added flour and dunked them one by one, tapping the excess mixture off of limbs like wet sand from fingers. 

          When I sacrificed them to the fryolator, I thought I could hear residual screams, despite their silence when I rendered them lifeless. It was, technically, the fervent rejection of their water-filled bellies into the bubbling ochre. They fought back from the grave, and spatters of their guttural pasts freckled my exposed skin. 

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As the scorching grease melded itself to my arms and face, I swallowed my own internal waters. I sinned, escaping my station during dinner service to assess my wounds. My station was always searing me alive. The grill left badges of honor on my wrists. Melted butter from sautee pans endlessly forged into my pores. 

          My stint in the bathroom was short-lived, despite injury. I carried on meticulously cutting turkey clubs into quarters and garnishing entrees with fresh herbs. I want to say you gave me a nod of solidarity when I returned, but I think you told me not to be dramatic. Puckering red remnants of heat bubbling across my forearms.