The place looked nice online. Then I asked her about work. I had some cooking experience at the restaurant and had done almost all the cooking at home, so I asked if there was an opening at the catering company she’d just left.
“There’s always an opening,” she replied. “The owner’s a witch. She runs everyone off. She’s like barely five-foot and she has a massive mole on her left cheek. Her name is Marge.”
I hesitated a moment, then said, “She named her mole Marge?”
Wendy laughed so hard she had to run to the bathroom. We were friends before we even met.
Wendy was right about the catering job. They were hiring. Perpetually. Not only were the wages good—$18.50 an hour, which was more than double what I’d ever made before—but I also got tips. Sometimes big ones. And there were insurance benefits.
“It’s not worth a hundred dollars an hour,” Wendy told me. “It’s psychological abuse. You’ll end up paying more for a good therapist.”
“Do they have mental health benefits?” I asked.
The thing was, I wasn’t really afraid of anyone, and I needed better money than I was going to make waitressing. I figured I could do anything for a year. Catering certainly wasn’t something I had planned on making a career.
Actually, at that point I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, as I had been more focused on what I didn’t want it to be than what I wanted it to be. The job was just something I could do while I made up my mind.
It was also perfect timing for me, since I couldn’t go to school until I had established residency and could apply for a grant. I was one of those kids in a bind: my father had too much money for me to get student aid, but he wasn’t willing to give me any of it. I was stuck.
Wendy had understated the pay but not her former employer. Marge Watson burned through employees like cars burn through tires at the Indianapolis 500. She was professional enough to never scold an employee in front of a client, but that was about the extent of her self-discipline. She’d eat employees for breakfast. She was good at it, and since most of her employees were young kids who had never worked before, they never lasted long.
Her personality didn’t faze me. Compared to my father, she was a kitten. And unlike my father, she couldn’t hit me—though Wendy told me that she did slap an employee once. The employee sued, and the slap ended up costing Marge thousands of dollars. She never hit anyone after that.
Still, I knew it was only a matter of time before she came after me, so I waited for my turn, not with fear but with curiosity. I wondered what I would do.
Outside of me and the revolving door of part-time employees, there were two Mexican women who also worked full time: Frida and Eiza. Marge wasn’t nice to them either, but they never seemed to mind her rants. I wasn’t sure if it was a cultural thing, if they needed the money too much, or if they just didn’t really understand what she was saying, as neither of them spoke English very well.
Finally my day came. I had a confrontation with a trust-fund bridezilla who had had too much to drink and suddenly insisted that she had ordered a four-tier wedding cake instead of a three. I wasn’t sure if she thought I was going to quickly bake her a new tier or what her endgame was, but I just brushed her off.
Then she shoved me. She shouldn’t have done that. I threw her up against a wall and, with my forearm across her throat, said, “You touch me again and your wedding pictures will look like something out of a Stephen King movie.”
When I let her go, she ran out crying. Of course the bride’s mother went ballistic on Marge, who of course then came after me. Marge was blue in the face and yelled at me until I thought she might burst a blood vessel. I just looked at her, unaffected. I think she thought I would quit, like everyone else did, but I was going to make her fire me so I could collect unemployment if I had to.
Neither happened. When she finished her tirade, I said calmly, “You should try Prozac. And breath mints.” Then I walked out the back door.
As I was about to get into my car, Marge poked her head out the door and shouted to me, “I am on Prozac. Don’t be late Monday.”
Marge never got mad at me after that. I was probably the first employee who had ever stood up to her and, in so doing, had earned her respect. It was almost like she was testing me— like at the end of the first Willy Wonka movie. The good one.
When I started, Just Desserts only did weddings and an occasional bar mitzvah. (Utah, due to its religious culture, has a myriad of the former and a dearth of the latter.) Then people began asking us to do their company parties and corporate catering. As we expanded, Marge taught me everything she knew about the trade.
After that first year, Marge offered me a sizable raise to delay college and work full time for the company. I’m not really sure why Marge started the company to begin with, other than she was fiercely independent and didn’t like the idea of living in her husband’s shadow. Her husband, Craig, was the CEO of a local plumbing supply company. I only met him a few times, but he was a good-looking, clean-cut man, always perfectly coiffed. One of those shiny people like Clive. He and Marge were about as compatible as mayonnaise and maple syrup.
I have no idea what brought the two of them together. He was soft-spoken, kind, and respectful, and Marge was Marge. She treated him like dirt. I always felt sorry for him.
Peculiarly, I had worked for Marge for more than a year before I found out she had a daughter. Tabitha. Not surprisingly, they didn’t get along. From what I gathered, Tabitha wanted to be a playwright and lived, with a credit card from her father, in New York City, working backstage on off-Broadway productions.
As time passed, I realized that I was Marge’s only friend. I also sensed that she was getting bored with the business, as she gave me more and more responsibility until I was pretty much running the place. (Kind of like what I was presently doing with Carina.) After two more years Marge doubled my salary and made me the chief operating officer, which meant I still did the same thing, I just got paid for it.
Then, one snowy February morning, Marge called me as I was getting ready for work. Her voice was hoarse and a little stiffer than usual.
“Craig’s gone,” she said.
“Gone where?” I asked.
“He had a heart attack while he was shoveling the walk. He’s gone.”
She was so stoic that I wasn’t sure how to respond. “I’m sorry.”
“I won’t be coming in,” she said.
I didn’t see her for almost nine weeks. Then, two weeks after my twenty-third birthday, Marge asked to meet me for lunch at her favorite restaurant, a local bistro run by German people who were as rude as she was.
I got to the restaurant a few minutes early. Marge still hadn’t arrived, so the hostess sat me and brought me a drink. Ten minutes later Marge walked in. I almost didn’t recognize her. I couldn’t believe how much she had changed in just a short time. She’d already been skinny, but now she looked gaunt, her skin tight on her cheeks, which made her look old. Her hair had turned completely gray. I don’t know if the stress of her husband’s death had gotten to her or if she had just stopped coloring it. Maybe both.
“Have you ordered yet?” she asked, sitting down. I thought it was a strange thing to say to someone you hadn’t seen in over two months.
“No. I was waiting for you.”
“Who’s your waitress?”
I pointed to a young, flaxen-haired woman setting drinks at another table. “Her.”
“You,” Marge shouted to the young woman. “We’re ready to order now.”
“I’ll be right there,” the waitress said, looking somewhere between annoyed and stunned. A moment later she walked over. “Are you ready to order?”
“I just told you we were,” Marge said. “Now get out your little notepad there. We’ll have the red hummus appetizer to share, then I’ll have a bowl of the sweet potato soup, and tell the chef that if he puts too much turmeric in it this time, I’ll make him eat it.”
The server let out a short sigh, wrote down the order, then turned to me. “What can I get for you?”
“May,” Marge interrupted. “What may I get for you. You’re a professional, honey. If you’re going to work with the public, you need to speak their language.”