Holding

You're fourteen. Your mother is outside, picking apricots. You're in the kitchen, watching Nadia Comăneci on a small black-and-white TV, the one wedged between the Stickley side table and a jumbled coatrack. Your mother comes in carrying four plastic bags of just-ripe fruit. Her pockets are bulging. She's wearing last year's Home Ec project: a denim apron you made out of scraps, the edges of each square fraying because you didn't know how to stitch them right.

"What time do you want to leave?" she asks.

"Four o'clock," you say.

Tonight you start a new job, your first real job, meaning not a babysitting job, meaning you will be working the counter at Dee's. Your mother begins cutting apricots, sliding them into a silver stockpot, pouring in sugar and water, then stirring. For the rest of the summer she will stand at the stove, stirring, waiting for the liquid to thicken. And you will spend your hours at your new job and at home watching Nadia on TV, Nadia as she stands on the beam, Nadia with her arms raised, Nadia with her back arched, Nadia with her toes pointed.

You hold your breath.

All summer you hold your breath.

________

The first night at Dee's everything comes at you all at once. The red polyester uniform, which you are instructed to wear every night; the paper work to be filled out, so you can get paid in two weeks; the instructions for how to punch in, don't forget; and rules, so many rules: how to work the cash register, how to count out change, how to place an order, how to bag the food. The head cook shows you how the cash register spits out what looks like a receipt, how to clip that slip of paper to a metal ledge, and what to say to him as heads-up when he's behind the grill. You're to say burger without, for instance, if a customer orders a hamburger without onions. When you ask why not say without onions, just to be safe, he stares at you like he can't figure out where you're from, shrugs, then says, "Because we don't do it that way."

Your first night you mess it up again and again, and when you close your register you're $3.29 short, but everyone says, "Don't worry, it will get better tomorrow."

When tomorrow comes, a man approaches the cash register and hands you a tiny receipt without saying a word, then steps to the side. You thank him and throw the receipt away. Then another man comes up and does the same thing. Again you smile and say thank you and throw the receipt in the trash.

Finally the head cook, a skinny boy who, rumor has it, already has one kid and by the end of the summer will have Baby Number Two, tells you they're deaf; they work at the printing press across the street; they're handing you their orders, which they've written on the backs of old receipts.

All summer the silent men come on their eight o'clock lunch breaks each night, and all summer women in short skirts come in to order apple turnovers and TaB. The women wear glittery nail polish and bright red lipstick and stand outside on the street corner, smoking. You ask the cashier next to you, "What are they doing out there?" and the girl laughs, and says, "What do you think they're doing? Working, like everybody else."

Then you know.

The rest of your life, it will go like this: you won't know until you do.

________

Your mother brings home a chocolate cake from Mrs. Backer's Pastry Shop. You turn fifteen. And all summer you wait. For the fries to finish frying. For the cooks to call your order up. For your first paycheck. For your first kiss.

You wait for someone from Marie Callender's to call, because Marie Callender's is where you most want to work. If...