cheese factory

my ticky tock
white plastic clock

white numbers
in a circle
on
the old
white wall

the ticky tock
white plastic clock

wound itself
down
last week

sometimes it says four o'clock
when I know
it's noon
and twelve when
I know
it's suppertime

the second hand is trying
valiantly
to scootch beyond its
trap

and the ticky tock
white plastic clock
always
makes me
laugh

I'm not going to change the battery,

I say
to the dying
face
of time
on the white tiled
wall

because it's more fun to guess
and remember
what time
it might be

and now
a week later
the hands have stopped
at ten fifty six
almost eleven
which is a perfect time

day
or
night

it's the time
that the
ladies show up
for work

at the macaroni & cheese
factory

they all wear
beautiful dresses
in shades of blue
and green

their long dark hair
loose
about their shoulders

and their skin
so moist and powdery
bare arms
wooden spoons

while the music starts
and they
toil
dancing circles
round each other

and singing
disco songs
over rolling pots
of boiling elbows

whisking the milk
and the butter
with their voices
and their happy chatter

into the clouds of steam
under the fans
and the lightbulbs

on the rooftop
sweatshop
of
bright
orange
food.




.

2:27 AM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

squirrel is number one

I was sitting cross legged,
Zoning way far out,
A cup of tea in my hands,
Letting the morning sun smash into me through the trees and the grass.

Nobody was awake yet,
I was feeling very quiet in my morning-after smile-mood,
Playing my favorite game of silent research,
The morning after a party is archeology at its freshest
I wake up so early and creep around the rooms and the yard
Measuring and noticing the facts
Squashed grapes on the bathroom floor
Potato chip shards and splashes of wine
Bottlecaps on the windowsills
I love the morning after
When the mess is tragic and insurmountable
It blooms flowers of fondness on my lips
Because it's evidence
Something Happened Here
I think
This is what we humans make:
The laughter and the toasts and the singing of anthems
The grime and the wear and the tear
I love the wreckage
Something still lingers
And when it's dead quiet
And everyone still sleeps upstairs
I collect glasses and stack platters
And put the kettle on.

I steeped the tea and catalogued the remnants
Of the swish and the tinkle
And the stomps and the guffaws
And then
I sat down cross legged before the window and let my mind go glossy
And then
(This is what I want to tell you)
I heard a noise
On the porch

And it was a squirrel
In my big brass petunia pot
With a nut in his jaw

He was alert
Looking at me
The morning sun zapped his ears to a glowing orange-pink
He leapt to another flower pot
And froze
With his two hands on terra cotta
And his two feet on brass
In the sun
With a nut in his mouth

And then he flicked his tail in a slow motion way
That was graceful and calculated
Like
Like

Like the best ribbon in a breeze
Like water
Like fire made out of hair


And then he moved lightning quick and bounced down
And away along the sidewalk
And he made for the dogwood tree
Scrambling up the trunk.

Later in the morning, when the others started stirring
And getting hungry
And walking around talking about food,
I told my friend about the squirrel
Especially about the tail dancing

And he told me a story about how he and his wife
Had noticed a big fat old squirrel outside their kitchen window
One time
And didn't think anything of it
But then,
That night, when he came home from work,
His wife asked him about eating english muffins
And he didn't know what she was talking about
She led him into the kitchen
And showed him the mess she thought he'd left
It turns out that
The squirrel saw the english muffins on the counter
And started gnawing on the screen
Until he made the hole big enough
For his hands but not the muffins
That's why there were shredded crumbs of english muffins
All over the place.

When he told me this story,
I got to laughing and I couldn't stop myself
From falling in love with squirrels
All over again

Squirrels are my current favorite
A power critter, if I may,
A familiar to the heart of my head

And this is just the beginning
The squirrel and the crumbs
And the broom and the smiles
This is just the first thing
This is just the beginning
There's so very much happening here,
I think,
Oh, Yes,
This is what we humans make.



.

2:17 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

gas party

Gas Party!

Is what I yelled out the window of the moving car

Gas Party!

Is what all the other cars were having at the ONE station that held gas for sale

Lined up around the block

Mufflers choking on themselves

Bored passengers

Listlessly waiting their turn in line for the

Gas Party!

Woot! Woot!

Ha!

Shortage!

Let's Dance!

Gas Party!

At the Phillips 66!

At the Texaco!

Shell! BP! Marathon! Mapco!

Gas Party!

Express Tiger On The Run!

Cold drinks! Beer! Milk 99 Cents!

Pepsi! Gatorade! Antifreeze!

Gas Party!

The chug a lug cars stretching round the block

pumping ghetto bass

for Crack Jane & Elaine

Bumping & grinding in the plumes

Of exhaust

I lean my head out my window

and yell

Gas Party!

Because it's high time someone yelled it,

the party's gone on way too long.





.

6:28 AM - 4 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

mossy hair

and late in the night
when the fire was cranking out smoke
i reached out across to her
perched on the edge of that picnic bench
with her hands clasped loosely between her knees,
her head bent,
nodding, slow and soft
on sweet red wine

she was 
bending toward me like a flower
with closed eyes and a wet smile
on her exotic sleepy
face
 
i reached out and brushed the top of her head with my hand
just a brush
and then i sank further
her hair all moist and mossy
juicy springs of
natural blackness

next to the fire
under the morning stars
in the middle of the night
in the middle of a party
 
people singing quietly in the corner
of the yard
wearing sunglasses to shield against the
glaring orange bath of the streetlight
 
the long grass bent and flattened
with our traffic
clover crushed under our feet
 
the fire huge and healthy
gobbling air
and gushing sparks
 
there were
people laughing in the kitchen
an occasional shriek
people
hugging each other
people
touching each others
shoulders and backs
and knees
to punctuate their speech
 
i plunged my hand
deep into the luscious marsh of her hair
my fingers feeling
suddenly cold against the warmth of her scalp
i tickled her bare skin lightly
with the tips of my fingers
buried up to the middle knuckle
in her mossy hair
 
and she melted forward a little more
murmuring
saying mmmm
like she was licking the spoon free of melted chocolate
and it seemed
to give her so much pleasure
 
i just didn't want to stop
i wanted to keep my hand buried near her brain
in that hot secret place
under her hair
where no one ever goes
 
it gave me the shivers
it was so beautiful
 
i asked her if my fingers felt cold
and she answered me slowly
without opening her eyes or lifting her head
that no, they just felt good
really really good
 
why, she asked, does my head feel warm?
 
yes, i said.  yes it does.
 
 
 

..

10:10 PM - 4 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

naked ladies

Things I've never done:

-Dived off a diving board
-Watched the movie Goonies
-Gone kayaking
-Gotten a tattoo
-Been to a strip club
-Gambled
-Rode on a motorcycle

I used to be able to say I'd never sung karaoke, but I can't say that anymore. The chance to hop in a kayak has happened; I'm just a chicken. I idled away a week in Las Vegas, but kept my purse strings tight, preferring to watch as others placed their bets. I'd love to ride a motorcycle, but my mom made me promise I never would, because her favorite cousin died in a crash. Goonies? People just can't believe it. I haven't pledged not to watch it, it just hasn't happened. Tattoo? Naah. And the diving board- let's just say that I've given up, even though a great number of well-meaning, handsome lifeguards have tried to break it down for me, I just CAN'T do it. So, that leaves the strip club.

Now I can no longer say I haven't been to a strip club. Where do I start this story?

I guess I'll start with my friend. She & I met in the ninth grade, and became very close, in our huge, TV style high school. We lived in the same neighborhood, and walked back and forth between our houses. Even though I wound up at a different school the following year, we always connected back with each other in a very cool way. Since we graduated, I've lived on in our hometown, getting married and working as a waitress. Not a terrible lot has changed with me, in terms of concrete factors. But her- She's a different story. She moved to Baltimore. She moved to Washington, to California. She's worked on farms in Ecuador, spent months in Brazil, in... She's been all over the map, doing good deeds on behalf of our planet. For the past few years, she comes back to visit her parents in the summer. We find ourselves walking those same old sidewalks, sneaking into swimming pools and eating peaches on our front porches.

It's powerful good to have a friend like her.

So, it's the end of summer. She came back into town. Saturday night, we decided to do the Art Crawl downtown. Great idea, right? We knew we'd meet up with someone, somehow, that could chauffeur us around, so we decided to head downtown on foot. Alas, the Art Crawl was over. Over! At nine! We looked into the windows of the locked-up galleries, slightly bummed, and mulled our options. We surmised that while we were downtown, we could at least wander around with the tourists for a while, and witness the spectacle of Music City.

We did that. Laughing, getting impressed by the innocent hometowny-ness of Nashville, even with the streets clogged with revelers. "People are so NICE, here," she said. "In California, if you smile and say Hi to someone, they look away..."

Which is true. After a while, we wanted to park our fannies and find a drink. We approached a club with a cluster of hip-looking people standing outside. Looking in the windows, we saw that the club was mostly empty. Make that completely empty. The room was enormous, lit with a glowing blue. The floors and walls were white and shiny, and the decor totally bare and zen. "There's NOBODY in there!" she said, grinning. "Let's go in!"

We got searched for weapons at the door (!?!) and entered. The music was thumping so loudly my bones vibrated. The place could have held three hundred people, but it held only us, and the dozen chic bartenders practicing their shaker-flips. The lady at the door had told us there were three floors, so we explored. Beyond the clean blue glow, we found a flipside. The other floors were vampire dens- black and red- black walls, red carpets, red lamps. And completely empty. And deafeningly loud.

We got a couple of gin & tonics from an eager bartender, and wandered from room to room, trying to find a cozy spot where we didn't have to yell. It was pretty funny, we wondered if the place might be a "later" destination, like maybe at midnight, those huge, open rooms would be packed with dancers and merry-makers. "This is totally surreal," I screamed at her. "It's like a dream! This is like a dream, like I'm going to wake up in the morning and shake my head, like, Whoa, I dreamed I was with my old friend, in this enormous, empty bar, yelling and laughing!"

"This place is like Heaven and Hell!" she yelled back.

We had fun there, and stayed for quite a while, yelling back and forth about our lives, about art and literature. By the time we left, ten or so people had shown up. We walked around downtown some more, tried out a couple of other places, witnessed the madness of bachelorette parties gone awry. One door-dude told me, "Wow, you're older than I am," when he checked my id. "Fuck this place," I said to my friend....

Fast forward a few hours. Some beer & nachos later, we decided it was time to walk home. It's not a terribly long walk, but it's uphill. Three miles, three and a half, maybe. It was two am. Downtown had gotten ugly. We passed some young men on the sidewalk. They were heading in, we were heading out. "Why would ANYBODY want to go down there, now?" I asked my friend, as they approached, their chests puffed out in conquest. Then I smiled, and called out to them, as they passed, "Yeah, guys, there's still lots of pretty girls down there! Keep going!"

She and I had had the giggles for hours. Everything had become hilarious at that point, that end-of-the-night point when everyone looks tired and trashed. But the next batch of young men we passed was different. We didn't speak to them, we kept our eyes down. They had a dangerous kind of swagger. They called out to us, wanting to know where we were going, where the party was. We bid them goodnight, and kept walking. One guy yelled out, "Come On! Why you gotta be so mean?!?"
She squeezed my arm. "Mean? Mean?" I asked her. "What the hell was so mean about Goodnight?"

"You're gonna be mean until you're sucking their dicks," she said.

I love her!

Oh, the walk. It was long. The air was cool, and progressively fresher as we left the beer-soaked streets and honky-tonk din of downtown. I could feel the temperature dropping, could taste the hints of fall around the corner. We kept walking, still laughing, crossing over the interstate, into the scrubby, industrial part of town. We came up on Deja Vu.

Oh, Deja Vu. The Showplace, according to the sign, Home of 100s of Beautiful Girls and 3 Ugly Ones! I've passed Deja Vu uncounted times in my life, marveling at its windowless, stuccoed exterior, where the prismatic, rainbow floodlights sweep, all night long.

I've never been into one of "those places." Years ago, it was because I was feeling feminist. Then because I didn't like the idea of paying money to look at boobs. I've always felt that if a woman wants to make money on her personal goods, then that's nobody's business but her own. I just didn't feel like I was the target market for the booty-show, so I always passed up the opportunity. Besides, I kind of liked being able to say, "I've never been to a strip joint."

There we were, on the sidewalk, the cadence of our feet marking the final mile, when the pastel spectrum lighting of Deja Vu filled the horizon. "Wanna go in there?" my friend asked, giggling. "It's kinda fun, definitely weird, but we could use a rest..."

We hemmed and hawed on the sidewalk, hopping from one foot to the other. Did we want to do it? The parking lot was full, the darkened front door stood open, mysterious music drifting out into the night air...

"How many strip clubs have you been to, anyway?" I asked her. She waved her hand, as if to say, hundreds. "This one's pretty good," she said. "The dancers are really athletic..."

That sealed it. We stood before the doorman, holding out our drivers licenses like trick-or-treat bags. He looked us up and down, and said, "Ya'll are cute. Really cute." Like we really were kids on his porch, asking for candy.

We got neon green wristbands, we went inside. My friend led the way, mercifully choosing a tiny table in the back of the crowded room. The place was packed. After walking the empty streets, it was shocking how many poeple were there, awake and riled-up. I got the giggles again, pretty bad, but the awe took over rather quickly.

There were naked ladies everywhere. Naked, and nearly-naked. Some of them wore complicated layers of string panties, some of them wore skirts the size of belts. All of them wore the highest heels I've ever seen. My thoughts went like this:

-Where do they find these amazing outfits? I've never seen panties like that!
-Their feet must be killing them at the end of the night.
-Wow, they're all so pretty.
-And so young.
-Are they on drugs?
-Are they working their way through school?
-How much money do these girls make, anyway?
-Who are all these other people?
-Am I going to bump into anyone I know?
-I'm glad it's so dark in here.
-Are these wax-jobs, or shave-jobs?
-Can I get another beer?

A tall, glamourous woman slunk up to our table like a cat. She asked if we wanted anything to drink. I mentioned beer, and she shook her head. BYOB. Oh. Water, then. Two waters. She returned quickly, producing two glasses, and left us alone.

We watched the dancers. I was absolutely mesmerized. They were really good dancers. I don't know what I expected, but I was surprised. Okay, I'll admit it. I expected run-down girls; with acne and cellulite and trite butterfly tattoos. I expected tacky, hooker-looking women, with bad teeth and fake hair. I was wrong.

These women were goddesses. No stretch marks, no bruises. Lovely, sexy, angelic faces. Expert makeup. Healthy, glossy hair. Their butts were so firm! Their skin was so tight on their frames; they truly had the lithe, lean bodies of ballerinas.

And the strutting! And the poles!

I knew there would be poles, but I didn't know what could be done with them. Last winter, I'd had a brief introduction to the pole. My sister-in-law and her boyfriend had come down South for a visit. We went bar-hopping downtown, and wound up at one corny place that had a pole in the back of the room. My sister-in-law knew how to work that thing, she'd taken a class at her gym. She shimmied and twirled all around it. "Ooh, Show me how!" I'd squealed, and she demonstrated a few basic moves. I tried it, gingerly at first, but then with more determination and trust in its solidity. The metal burned my palms, and I soon got dizzy. The men were laughing at me, partly because I was getting disoriented, but mostly because I started making hideous faces every time I swung back around. I stuck out my tongue and crossed my eyes, I panted and meowed. I acted really silly, and my sister-in-law's boyfriend filmed it. He threatened to post the video on youtube, but I begged him not to, and he finally relented.

I expected poles, but I did not expect the pole magic. These naked ladies were pole-queens. They looked as if they were underwater, or in outer space, turning themselves upside-down and right-side-up like anti-gravity mermaids. Their hair fell like silk when they went upside down, and then they could slide to the floor in this eerie, controlled way. Their legs were so long, and so strong!

My friend and I sat, sipping our water, exchanging surprised smiles and the occasional giggle. We talked about the girls' outfits, and their shoes. We discussed the funny way men were wadding up their money into tiny little balls and hurling it onto the stage. I had known that in the state of Tennessee, there's a three-foot law. Nobody can come within three feet of a performer. I knew that, but somehow I still expected men to be tucking sweaty bills into garters and under straps. But, no, the men can't do that. Instead, they are reduced to twisting up their cash and launching it, over the crowd, where it bounces onto the stage like valuable garbage. After her act, each girl would squat down, in her impossible heels, and scramble around, stuffing the balled-up money into a little bag.

The last dancer of the night was my favorite. Her name was Savannah. She looked as alien-perfect as Tracy Lords, and as graceful as a gazelle. She wore three tiny layered thongs, and her snow-white, patent leather heels must have been six inches high. She wore black and white striped legwarmers, and black and white striped sleeves that weren't connected to any kind of garment, they were just sleeves. She also wore a strapless, lacy black bra. She looked like smoldering jailbait. The crowd went nuts for her.

She danced as if she weighed nothing at all, her long white legs stretching this way, that way. She tossed her waist-length blonde hair with animal perfection. She was part prancing pony, part sex-kitten on ecstasy. It wasn't long before she'd taken off all her skimpy panties and her bra, and moved before us in those hypnotic stripes. Then, just when I was admiring her bravery and her skills, just when I was thinking, Yeah, Savannah, you really know how to work the room... She did the craziest thing.

She fell to her knees, and flung her head back. Her hair trailed over the heels of her shoes, her back arched, her nipples pointing at the ceiling. She reached a hand around the front of her body, and stroked a line down her chest. She stroked her hand down her chest, from her neck to her belly button, (People started cheering) and then she stroked it down, between her legs. She rested her hand over her bare nakedness for a second, and then (This is the crazy thing) She smacked it.

Savannah smacked herself. She slapped it! Slapped it, like it was a bad puppy, like I don't know what. She smacked herself two or three times, gyrated a little more, and then picked herself up. She gathered her money-balls and left the stage.

"Did you see that?" My friend and I asked each other, in simultaneous disbelief. "She SMACKED IT!"

It was at that time that a tiny sexpot in a very abbreviated French Maid's outfit took the stage with a spray bottle of Windex and began shining the poles with a paper towel.

We'd gotten the giggles again, and decided to hit the bathroom before we resumed our walk. "Let's get out of here..."

In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror. I took in my nerdy glasses and my humidity-swampy hair. My knee high leather walking boots and artillery belt purse gave me courage with the prowling men on the streets, but here, they looked kinda dykey. My short felt jumper would have been perfect for the Art Crawl, but in the bathroom of Deja Vu, I just looked like a drunk librarian. I stood at the mirror, beside myself with silliness, putting lipstick on, saying, "Oh, God, Look at me," snorting with laughter. My friend joined me, saying, "Sure, put some more lipstick on. That'll fix everything!"

We laughed so hard our faces hurt. "Look at MY hair," she said. She'd cut it herself, and it was very, very short. Shorter than she'd worn it in years.

"It kinda looks like a wig," I said, and we left, cackling, walking back out into the cool night air.

We only had another mile to go. My friend narrowly missed planting her flip-flop in a horrid splatter of vomit on the sidewalk. "It looks like Dinty Moore beef stew," she said. "It looks like somebody ate too fast," I said. We walked, arm in arm, past the dark, sleeping studios of Music Row. The sprinklers were spraying the sidewalks, the gardens were all dripping. We still couldn't believe how Savannah smacked herself.

Outside my house, at last, we said our goodnights. It was a real goodbye; she was leaving in the morning, flying back to California, where she lives with her boyfriend on a sailboat and studies birds and their behavior. We hugged, and smiled.

"See you next summer," I called out, as she walked up my street, back to her childhood home. I came into the house, still laughing, kicked off my boots, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.

I closed my smiling eyes and konked out, Thanking my lucky stars that I have such a wonderful, fun, supportive friend, grateful that at the end of a night of spontaneous improvising, I got to sit with her and watch the naked ladies dance.





...

1:10 AM - 4 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

three plastic milkcrates

I carried my mug of tea out through the kitchen, through the storage room (shelves stacked high with huge cans of blueberry pie-filing, albacore tuna, artichoke hearts) and through the back door. Break time. Fifteen minutes.

Out back, on the dock, I touched the black plastic milk-crate, testing its greasiness, before I sat down. It was raining, a little, and the sky was a solid, illuminated grey. Rita and Shameka were taking their breaks, too, sitting on the other two crates. Three crates, three women, in a chain-link cage. Someone had had the excellent foresight to fasten a tarp over the ceiling of the cage, with bungee cords. The tarp kept the rainwater from soaking us.

They were talking about children. Rita is Mexican, has lived in the U.S. since her childhood. She's missing a few crucial teeth, and she carries a lot of extra weight, mostly around her middle. She does all the baking, pounding the loaves of challah, gingerly sliding the endless sheets of chocolate chip cookies into the enormous ovens. She has five children, all grown. Some of her children have had children, too.

"Little LeLe was cracking me up, girl," Rita said to Shameka. "She say, 'I'm gonna fight, I gonna pop 'em!' And when I ax her who she gonna fight, she just say, 'Them kids!' And she start doing like this-" Rita raised her small, doughy hands in fists, imitating a weak boxer, her long cigarette ash dropping onto the wet concrete. Shameka and I laughed.

"How old is LeLe?" asked Shameka, rubbing her calf, scrutinizing the stretch marks on her rich, black skin. Shameka is in her mid-twenties, she's a local girl. She lives in the projects, about three blocks from my house. She has four children, her youngest is eighteen months, her oldest is fourteen. Four children, four daddies. Three women, three crates.

"Girl, LeLe's only three!" Rita hiccuped, stabbing her cigarette into a puddle. "Mmm, mmm, hmm, " clucked Shameka, shaking her back and forth in sympathetic amusement. A fly crawled over her hairnet, tasting the pink elastic of her ponytail, wiping its hands.

I studied the white pinstripes of my apron, holding my plain white mug in my hands, inhaling green tea steam, listening. Rita told us about her son's new house, far out in the suburbs. "And it's got four bedrooms, four! And a big backyard, I mean big, girl. The kids go out there and play..."

"Wish I had me a house," Shameka said, still stroking her calf.

"My son keep telling me, 'Mama, why you still gotta work three jobs?' And I tell him, 'Because, baby, it's all I know! All I done the past twenty-five years is work, work, work. I had to take care of you kids, and without no man," Here, Rita sighed, a deep, resentful sigh, and wiped her palms on her raspberry- stained apron. "Without no man, I had to feed you-all, and put clothes on your backs and shoes on your feet." She looked at me. "They never had no name-brand shit, but they had shoes on they feet."

"Mmm, mmm, Hmm," Shameka and I replied.

"But now it's our turn to take care of you, Mama' is what he tells me. And I say, 'Not yet, baby, I still got twenty, thirty more years of working in me.' But he play the lottery, every week, and he keep on about when he wins, he gonna set me up with a nice house and I don't gotta work no more."

Shameka massaged a Swisher Sweet in its wrapper. The crinkling cellophane made a sound that blended nicely with the drips of rain falling from the edges of the tarp around us.

I sipped my tea, and expressed what a joy it would be, for Rita's son to win the lottery. Rita beamed, showing me the bald spots in her mouth, her brown eyes folded shut, in imaginary pleasure, behind her flour-dusted bifocals.

Shameka unwrapped her baby cigar, and wordlessly held her hand out for Rita's lighter. Her palm looked so soft and white. I thought about palm-readers.

Palm readers, psychics, lottery tickets. Fast-food drive-thrus, irritable landlords, minimum wage. Dirty diapers, missing daddies, flat tires. The realities of relative poverty, the dreams of striking it rich.

Shameka lit her cigar, and played the smoke between her mouth and nose in a masterful way, her eyes closed. Soft-spoken, and easily surprised, Shameka is as gentle as a lamb. She makes sandwiches and salads for white folks five days a week, and she takes great pride in her hair. Every ten days or so, she will appear in the morning with a fresh new 'do. Sometimes she gets braids woven in, bright red or blue. Sometimes she has spiky bangs, sometimes her hair is curled in ringlets and flows down her back. I don't know what Shameka's hair would really look like, if left alone and un-fixed. I've often wondered how much it costs her, that commitment to upkeep.

Rita is losing her hair. She plays tricks with barrettes and bobby pins to mask the pale shine of her scalp, but the hairnets reveal her loss. Rita and I watched as Shameka smoked. We talked, about how busy the morning had been, how much of a jerk the head line-cook is, how we can't wait to clock out for the afternoon. I drank my cup of tea, laughing, lapsing into a lazy grammatical style, throwing a "Girl," and an "Mm, hm," in once in a while.

Three crates, three women. Eleven o'clock on a Friday morning, in the calming rain. For a brief minute, I was acutely aware of the clarity of the tiny diamonds I wear on my fingers, aware that I make probably three times the money that these two women do, that I will never struggle the way they will. For a brief minute, I was aware of these glaring, obvious differences. It hits me like that sometimes, out of nowhere, that our casual intimacies with each other defy the standards of our situation.

Rita has been baking with us for five years, maybe six. Shameka came in about four years ago. We've found a niche, each of us, found a comfortable little job that pays those neverending bills. We've found a constant in an ocean of variables.

Through all these years, we've grown to know each other. Through all those winters, broken-down cars, pregnancies, kids' getting in trouble at school- all those mornings when we all show up at the restaurant before dawn, complaining about the weather, complimenting one another's hair- through all these summers, through Shameka's fifth abortion, through Rita's romantic conquests, and good-natured bitching about men- we are just three women, sitting on three crates, in the rain.

Raindrops slid through the tarp, and landed on my knee. The water was cold. The drops fell in a kind of pattern, and as I watched, a woman's face appeared on the faded black fabric of my worn-out work pants. Plink, plink. Drip, drop, drip. A woman with sad eyes and dramatic, pouty lips.

After a minute, I put my empty mug down on the concrete at my feet, and pulled my phone out of my apron pocket. I fiddled with it, and, squinting, snapped a photo of the face on my knee. Shameka smiled at me. I amuse her.

I watched as a luxury SUV pulled into the parking lot, and parked crookedly in a narrow space. Three young men hopped out. Strapping, sexy college students, with the cuffs of their designer jeans trailing over the heels of their flip-flops, getting darkened with rain puddles. The SUV chirped as they walked away from it, the alarm activated. They talked and joked as they made their way to the front of the restaurant, their carefree, macho laughter echoing around the corner.

"Ever notice how crappy parking is contagious?" I asked. "The next person that comes in is gonna have to park crooked next to that car, and then the next, and the next, until before long, our whole parking lot is gonna be full of crooked cars. All because of those guys, and they didn't even notice how crooked they are!" I stood up, gesturing animatedly, in mock indignation. My fifteen minutes had expired.

Rita stood up, too, groaning and retying her apron around her thick waist. Shameka joined us, dropping her plastic-tipped Swisher Sweet into the butt-bucket by the door. I followed Rita through the back door, past the broom closet, through the storage room, and Shameka followed me. Rita bore the criss-crosses of the milk-crate on her bottom. I smoothed the seat of my pants as I walked, bidding Rita farewell at the baking table, where she began poking the mounds of rising dough. "Just gotta couple more hours," she called after me, giggling, "And then I'm having me a wine cooler!" She cracked herself up with that, and I threw her a wink over my shoulder, as Shameka and I walked down the line.

The chaos of the line. Men yelling, cracking eggs onto the sizzling flat-top, spatulas flipping pancakes, burgers hissing with popping fat, tickets printing out with that zzt zzt noise, the dishwasher coming around the corner with his arms full of plates, all that yelling. "Plates to the line! Watch your back! Joe, gimme forty-two scrambled! Hot! Plates to the line! Behind you! Ken, Chicken soup! Gimme a bagel for a mother fuckin breakfast sandwich! Plates to the line!" Burners, spoons, knives, ladles. Beards, baseball caps, tattoos. Men sweating in the heat, screaming themselves hoarse over eggs, slamming dishes of mashed potatoes and gravy into the window.

Shameka stopped at the dingy hand-sink, punching load after load of foaming disinfectant soap into her huge, beautiful hands. She always uses too much soap. She turned the tap on using her wrists. I swept on a fresh coat of organic lipstick, checked my face in the stainless reflection of the produce cooler. Then I sailed through the swinging door, leaving the clatter and the disorder of the kitchen. I returned to the dining room, to my prescribed place in the front of the house, smiling, ready to fill my pinstriped pockets with tips.


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