wooden tables, straightening the wrought-iron chairs, attacking imaginary dirt and grease spots wherever he thought he saw them. Then he turned his attention to polishing the big brass beast of an espresso machine, which was his pride and joy. I’m sure it was for the ninetieth time that morning. When I came through the door he waggled his hand at me.
“Thanks for letting me come in late, Mike,” I gasped.
“When have I ever not let you come late? Hey, Miranda. Got a story for you.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“See, this old guy, Italian guy, is lying on his deathbed, and while he’s lying there worrying about whether he’ll be allowed into heaven, he smells this great aroma of almond cookies. His favorite. So he hauls himself out of bed and with the last bit of strength left in his body, he crawls downstairs to the kitchen, and there on the tables are dozens of these almond cookies, still hot. My wife loves me, he thinks, she’s done this last wonderful thing for me. And he starts to get himself over to the table. He reaches out for a cookie with a trembling clawlike hand, and the hand gets smacked with a spatula by his wife. ‘Back off,’ she says. ‘They’re for the funeral.’”
I smiled.
“That’s my family all over. You want a capooch? A fast one? We’re gonna be slammed again in about two minutes.”
We were always slammed at Mike’s. The customers moved in like an evil storm cloud. A clot of professional suits were always first, then law books from the university, and finally, old bundles of rags looking for handouts and a warm corner. My shift normally started at seven. I liked to get there early to fix myself a latte on the house and drink it slowly before total panic set in. Mike knew how to create an environment that fostered returning customers: he was sanguine and shrewd, bellowing love and peace at everybody who came in as though they were his oldest and best friends in the world.
I always went into the back room before doing anything else. At a large steel table near the refrigerators sat Grace, the sandwich lady, buttering her way into heaven. She came into work an hour before the rest of us. Soft-spoken, devout and well past middle age, with rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses on a pearl-look chain and a complexion like wartime margarine, she arrived at dawn to slab together her creations and by the time the sun came out she had disappeared, making you wonder if she really existed.
She was constantly cold. Working in that dank room beside the kitchen with all that refrigeration humming away next to her meant she always wore an old pom-pom-covered rainbow sweater. It had once belonged to her mother. The pom-poms jiggled and bounced as she buttered.
Mike had unwittingly gotten a saint when he hired Grace.
Grace was still there when I entered. She’d waited for me. She slipped me a food gift in a brown paper bag and said, “Here, Miranda, honey, this is for later when you get hungry. Mike’s a nice guy but he’s sooo cheap. I know he pays you girls squirrel droppings.”
I took the gift and said, “Where did Mike find you, Grace?”
“It was the Lord’s doing, dear.” In Grace’s world, there was just the one, omniscient, celestial boss. “And Miranda…the opera was just lovely. I cried through the whole last act.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“And I picked you out, too. You had a yellow kimono, didn’t you, dear?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, you looked just lovely. I’ve always said, and I’ll go on saying until they listen, you have a special quality.”
Grace was my biggest fan. Even if I was buried in the back of a hundred-voice chorus, she was there to witness my special quality. She got all my complimentary tickets. If I was singing anywhere, she was there in the audience beaming goodwill at me.
I stashed the paper bag in my knapsack, tied on my apron with its big print of Renaissance cherubs kissing, then went to take on the crush of customers.
My first cover was a group of men from the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Now, I should tell you, these are the kind of guys who are regularly held hostage by mirrors. They can’t pass one without getting frozen in front of it, momentarily sucked in by the vortex of their own fabulous reflections.
These men swaggered in like a bunch of action-movie stars and took up way more space than was necessary. You could see it all over them, like a kind of radioactive glow. Money. Money flowing like Niagara. They loved it. It was all-powerful, the perfect aphrodisiac.
I stood at their table impatiently tapping my pencil against my pad, waiting for them to make up their minds. The Donald Trump wannabe of the group grasped my wrist and said, “I was admiring your balcony and wondered if I could lean on it sometime?” He didn’t even bother with eye contact. He talked straight to my breasts as though they were two nice people who were about to make a big donation to his favorite charity. It was frustrating.
I was starting to develop a real love-hate relationship with my breasts. Lately, they’d been attracting a lot of attention. Kurt’s attention was just fine. It was the rest of it that got on my nerves. The Curse of the Mammary Glands. My breasts had been total dickhead magnets since I was fourteen.
My first impulse was to grab the poor guy by the shoulders and shake him till his eyeballs rattled around like dried peas in a tin cup, but while I was on duty at Mike’s, I ignored first impulses. If I played it right, those tips would get my plane as far as Alberta.
“Waitressing is my life,” I said, and flashed him a little smile. “I wouldn’t think of ruining my dream career by mixing business with pleasure. Sorry. Maybe in another incarnation.”
He looked a bit confused and let go of my hand. It was clear that slinging hash was not his idea of a dream career. But I believed that if I was going to get any enjoyment out of life at all, then I had to be Buddhist about it, and try to caress the difficult and boring bits of my day, give them a little respect, too.
I thought of that plane, taxiing down the runway, the roar just before takeoff, and I soared through the rest of the shift.
By eleven o’clock, the sun shone between billowing white clouds. I exchanged my Doc Martens for Adidas again and jogged off toward the Gastown studio where La Chanteuse and Matilde awaited me.
Lance Forrester, technician, artistic director and owner of the voice-over company Vox, was outside sitting on the doorstep. His forehead was furrowed and his eyes squeezed tightly shut. He was concentrating intensely on something.
This is a really profound mental process going on here, I thought.
Before I was near the step, he stated, “Miranda Lyme,” then opened his eyes.
“Wow. Lance. How did you do that? How did you know it was me?” I asked.
“Your smell. You have a great smell. Like a bunch of freesias that have been first rained on then lightly sprayed with fresh sweat.”
I was standing in front of him now. He shocked me by pulling me down onto his lap and shoving his dark curly beard into my neck, imitating a snuffling animal. “Great, great odor.”
“Lance. These are female pheromones you’re talking about.”
“I’m not particular.”
But
