Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (5 page)

As I dried myself off, I thought about the first time I'd gone into that bathroom. My mother had hushed her voice, like it was some sort of haunted/sacred space, and told me the story of the woman who'd lived here before us. “She delivered her own BABY on this floor ALONE DURING A STORM! She tied the cord and bit it off. Like an animal!”

Standing there dripping, I tried to draw strength from our hearty predecessor. Could I ever bite off a cord? Could I even reach my belly button with my teeth? Never mind: a challenge was a challenge. I could feel my competitive spirit taking hold. I couldn't lose to the former owner of this house. If she bit the cord, I could totally bite the cord.

I mean, all I had to do was stand in the same spot, dying from boredom and avoiding pinkeye, for seven dollars an hour. I could do that, right? I was twelve, and this was my 'Nam.

I looked at my face in the mirror and wiped the tears away. I wouldn't think about how I was missing Aimee's birthday party, with everyone watching
Splash
and playing bingo and French-kissing the backs of their hands. I would never have French-kissed the back of my own hand, but I totally would have watched the girls who did.

I put on my dishwasher's uniform and looked in the mirror. I was about to spend eight hours in hell and I was going to make fifty-six dollars. No wonder adults were always miserable. A paycheck was just a bit of compensation for putting up with bullshit.

When I got to the Haus of Horrors, I tried not to think about the toast, or the food runners, or even the kid who seemed lucky for getting to bus tables and talk to customers. I just stood there, in the back of the kitchen, alone, pretending I was Paul from
The Wonder Years
. I even brought along a pair of gloves to protect myself from communicable diseases. But the Paul game got boring pretty quick because I had no one to share it with.

Using my imagination to make the best of a terrible situation is one of my favorite games, no matter who was dying, Baba or the birthday rabbit in the magician's hat. I moved on to the next thing. I pretended I was a paraplegic standing on my frozen legs, and moved only my upper body for the first half hour, bending over to grab the dirty dishes. I wondered if my dad got through his long hours at the property management company the same way. Maybe he'd pretend he was a little slow and answer the phone all crazy and say his name was Randy when someone he didn't like was calling. Or maybe he'd just start drooling when someone started telling him boring things about accounting.

I was impressed that I was able to do my job relying on just my upper body for movement. But the trouble with these little mental games is that no one else notices unless you share the love. So I decided to take action.

“Hey, Dirk!” I yelled to the toast kid, turning only my upper body around to face him. “Check it out! I've only used my upper body for the last half hour! I'm pretending to be totally paralyzed from the waist down.”

He didn't even look up. “Why?”

Ugh! What was wrong with people?! Does no one have an imagination? At Baba's funeral, I told a second cousin that I was pretending Baba was pranking me for my birthday. That cousin called me insane. Then I told my sister that our cousin was secretly adopted, because I refused to believe that anyone I shared DNA with could be so boring.

“What do you mean,
why
?” I asked Dirk. “Why? Because I'm so freaking bored!! Aren't you bored? What are you thinking about over there?”

He shrugged his shoulders. God, it must be nice to be an idiot.

After Dirk the toast king dismissed my amazing feat of strength, I decided the only thing I could do next was dance. The German music was getting inside my head, and I was in danger of losing my mind to the mundane.

All at once, I let loose and started to do a little jig with my recently paralyzed bottom half. I really let myself get into it.

And someone noticed me.

“Whoa! Yes!
Vonderful!
” Arnie had wandered into the kitchen, and now he was clapping and dancing along with me. Yes! This wasn't so terrible after all. Finally, someone who was willing to feel some sort of joy.

I pulled off my gloves and started to swing and jig with Arnie. It was like when Captain von Trapp sang “Edelweiss” with the children and Maria came in and they caught each other's glance and for a moment everything was glorious, though of course for them everything eventually came up Nazis. This was like that, because of what I did next.

As Arnie twirled me around, I stomped and stomped . . . and stomped my foot down into a giant bucket of pancake batter.

Not all the way to the bottom. I stopped when I felt it—when I heard the slap.

I'll never unhear that slap.

“SCHEISSE!”

I had no idea how I'd stepped into the bucket. It seemed impossible, given how tall its sides were, but clearly this was Arnie's fault, because who puts pancake batter into a five-gallon pail on the floor when there's German jig music playing?!

I pulled my shoe out of the batter and saw a broken kitchen-floor eggshell peel off the bottom of my purple Dr. Marten and fall into the batter.

“Sorry?”

And then it happened. An adult who wasn't related to me got mad at me. I'd ruined his pancakes.

“HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO DO ZHIS?!?! VHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”

I was frozen, looking at his purple face, my gaze slowly moving to his hairy ear.

My parents had been angry with me before, but never like this. My parents yelled, but my parents loved me. This guy did not love me. This guy wanted to kill me.

As he screamed on and on about the batter, his giant eyeballs popping out of his face, I started to cry a little. He either sensed the tears or saw them, and he stopped and left. I can only assume he was so angry because he realized he'd hired a small child to wash the dishes in his restaurant and thus was a monster of a human being.

I looked around at the faces of his children in the kitchen. Dirk with the smirk, one griddle boy with a look of embarrassment on his face, the other kid angry as he dumped out the pancake batter I'd stepped in. I felt like dirt, like Pollyanna must have felt when she was trying to grab her doll and fell from the roof and was TRULY paralyzed and ruined everyone's day.

Head down, I went back to the dishwashing station, no longer pretending to anyone, and spent the rest of my shift in a daze.

 

By three
P.M.
the restaurant was empty. I walked into the dining room and saw Arnie's wife, who looked like the child catcher from
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, only with awesome blond
Fatal Attraction
hair. She was sitting at a table reading the paper in her Garfield sweatshirt.

“I'm done,” I said. “Can I go home?”

She looked at me. “You're here until five.” My stomach sank. They owned me till five?

“But there's nothing to wash. If I go now, I can still make it to my best friend's birthday party.”

“Vacuum,” she said, the Garfield on her shirt wiggling under her giant German bosom, making it look like an actual cat taunting me. She handed me a vacuum.

That was my breaking point. No one had said a word about vacuuming. Sure, it was a better job than the dishes. But I was
done
with the dishes. I didn't believe a fair reward for finishing one job was
another
job, not at all. But I was on the Germans' watch. I had no option but to obey. I thought of the lady who had the baby on my bathroom floor and decided to bite the cord.

I hauled the giant industrial vacuum cleaner to the middle of the carpet, turned it on, and started dragging it back and forth across the wine-colored carpet. It weighed twice what I weighed, at least twenty times as much as my mom's Electrolux—and Mom had never once succeeded in persuading me to accept her five-dollar bribe and vacuum our house. Yet here I was dragging a monolith around for the grand sum of SEVEN DOLLARS AN HOUR. Vacuuming this room would take me twenty minutes, tops, and that meant TWO DOLLARS AND THIRTY-THREE CENTS. I turned the machine off.

A minute later, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. “Sorry,” I said. “This is really embarrassing, but . . . I quit!” I tried it a hundred ways: with a smile, with a frown, with a shrug.

Oh, I liked the shoulder shrug.

And then I walked back into the dining area and saw Arnie standing beside the vacuum.

“You aren't done yet,” he said, all singsongy, wagging a finger at me gently and smiling. I could tell he felt super-guilty for going all mean Captain von Trapp on me earlier and making me cry.

“I know. Sorry, this is really embarrassing, but . . . I quit.” I shrugged.

German Arnie made no expression. He just walked over to the cash register, opened it, and grabbed his calculator.

I picked up the phone and called my mom to get her to pick me up. When I came back to Arnie, he gave me an envelope.

“I really wanted this to work out,” I said, even though Arnie was now going through the day's earnings and not paying attention to me. I really needed him to understand I wasn't a true quitter. I needed him to understand my point of view. It was my time to shine. “And I
tried
, really hard, to like dishwashing. I wanted this job more than anything. Today I thought about this woman who had a baby on our bathroom floor.” I pulled out my deadpan pause for emphasis and comic effect and looked at Arnie, who was suddenly paying attention. “I thought, if this woman could have a baby on our bathroom floor, I could TOTALLY wash dishes for a few hours on weekends. It made sense in my head. But I just can't do it. I'm a kid, you know. Maybe kids aren't cut out for real jobs.” I said that last part for his kids, all of them but Dirk.

Arnie smiled. “Maybe when you get older you can try again.”

“No,” I said. “I'm not going to get dumber as I get older. I'm done with dishes.”

I left the restaurant and sat outside against the wall in the parking lot, my armpits sweating. I admired that he hadn't begged me to stay after giving that monologue. He didn't even tsk-tsk me. I figured my monologue must have hit home.

I peeked in the envelope and counted the money. Ninety-two dollars.

I shut it and thought about that for a moment. Despite everything—the boredom, the paralysis, the jig, the yelling, the two dollars and thirty-three cents to vacuum a room—I had to admit, that was a lot of money for a twelve-year-old girl. A girl who had nothing to spend money on except products from the Body Shop. I loved soap.

My mom sped around the corner in her Volvo station wagon. She had that “You've been raped for sure” look on her face.

I opened the clunky door and made eye contact. “I'm fine. No one touched me.”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing. I quit. It was terrible.”

She patted my shoulder. “I hate washing dishes too. Do you want to go to Aimee's party?”

I suddenly felt like I understood every adult complaint I'd ever heard. I understood every time my dad didn't want me to act out the entire
Full House
episode he'd missed when he got home late. I understood when my mom said, “Give me a minute,” and lay down on the couch with her hand across her forehead.

I didn't feel like going to a party, and I didn't even have strep throat.

“No. I'm not in the mood.”

“Wow. That's serious stuff. I'm glad you quit. You don't need the stress. You're prone to ulcers.” My mom pushed the Culture Club tape into the deck, and we both started to sing along to “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.” I looked down at my pay envelope.

“Dad is going to be mad.”

“Why?”

“Arnie yelled at me. When I tell Dad, he's going to be mad that he'll never be able to go back there for his schnitzel. Dad lost that schnitzel forever, all for ninety-two dollars. Not a good trade.” I paused, looking off in the distance. My mom looked to see what I was looking at.

“Mom, can we stop at the mall?”

The next day, I walked up to Aimee's locker with a giant basket from the Body Shop and a neon-pink sweatshirt decorated with black paint—Splatter Ink by Gaye. She and Arif quit talking when they saw me approaching with the monolith wicker swath-filled with bottles and jars of apricot lip gloss. Arif shoved his hands into his dress pants as Aimee started squealing with excitement.

“Sorry I couldn't make it to your birthday,” I said. “I got you this.” I passed her the gifts. I'd spend all of my dishwashing money at the Body Shop, and I'd only bought one bottle of bubble bath for myself. (Grapefruit. Invigorating.)

“Oh my God, Kelly, I am so glad you have a job. Look at this thing. You make more money than anyone who came to my party!” Aimee squealed.

“So, how's your job?” Arif asked. I could tell he was jealous.

I shrugged my shoulders. The night before, I'd lain in bed playing out this exact conversation in my head. I wasn't going to lie or sugarcoat my failure. I was the mature one, and I would allow my peers to learn from my experience with Captain von Trapp.

“I quit. It was awful. I don't think I can ever eat German again.”

Arif nodded. “Twelve is too young to have a job.”

I hated being wrong, but I'd never admit that he was right.

“I'm sad you missed my party,” Aimee said, digging through the basket.

“I'm sure your birthday was great and your grandma or a rabbit didn't die.”

She looked up at me. “You've had some bad parties. Sorry about your job.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. I'm planning on finding another one. Dishes are grosser than I expected. And I think I'm pretty lazy.”

That night, I long-poured my grapefruit bubble bath into the tub and lit a thousand candles. I sank deep into the suds and thought about poor Dirk, who was bound to a life of buttering toast to a sound track of German oompah music. I wanted to want him to become the new dishwasher, but I wasn't that heartless. All he had was a locally famous restaurant to inherit, while I was going to rise up against adversity, like Oprah.