A Restaurant Somewhere Else
Guess What
At the beginning of a December fifty-seven harvests prior to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ projected start date for the era of total global soil infertility, Julia got the job at Cascine.
She called the closest person she had in her life, who was her mother, to deliver the news by voice.
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ll be—’
‘I know.’
‘It’s such a step up.’
‘I know.’
‘Such a step forward.’ Her mother laughed, then kept laughing. ‘Imagine that.’
The low-fidelity audio of her mother’s laughter bade Julia to laugh as well. Their laughs were identical in cadence and dissimilar in pitch. Julia raised her non-smartphone- wielding hand to her head. ‘I’m imagining.’
Late November
Throughout her three unpaid trial shifts, Julia had received orientative and procedural supervision from Lena, the sous-chef whose position the former would, after having successfully demonstrated her utility to the latter, eventually be hired to inherit.
‘Mind your elbows.’ ‘Cut against the grain.’ ‘Sumac lives in the storeroom, not on the sideboard.’ ‘Next time, bring your own knife roll.’
Of the many formed and as-yet-unformed thoughts Julia had about Lena, the majority were dedicated to either comparing or deliberately attempting not to draw comparisons between their common and contrasting qualities. Lena was approximately Julia’s goal weight and sported the kind of pixie cut that made women of lesser confidence ideate over cutting their own hair short. She could not have been any more than five years older than Julia, but the extent of her culinary proficiency suggested decades of experience separating them. Each time Julia left Cascine following a trial shift, she felt inadequate in some new way and certain it had been her last.
After what would in fact prove to be Julia’s final trial shift, she and Lena exited the restaurant together into an unobtrusively warm front of glossy rain, leaving Ellery, the kitchen’s head chef, to finish locking up by himself.
Outside, as they walked, Lena announced that she intended to endorse Julia to Ellery for the sous position. Julia thanked her so much, said oh my god oh my god she couldn’t believe it, asked what were Lena’s plans and where was she headed, and – although she’d been referring more to the short-term when she’d asked those questions – responded encouragingly when Lena replied, ‘Somewhere good, Berlin, I have a connection out there.’ Looking down, Lena performed an incisive task on her smartphone and added, in a modulated tone that made what she said sound like a sideways way of saying something else, ‘Yeah, I’ve just been here too long, I think.’
If she ever cut her hair as short as Lena’s, Julia knew, she’d only want it long again after. She understood that all she really wanted was a change.
Because she was nice, Julia waited kerbside with Lena beneath the coldening rain, long enough for Ellery to catch up with and call goodnight to them both from his collapsible bike, its wheels raising a light spray as they planed the cycle lane’s slicked surface. Shortly thereafter, Lena took her place among the city’s Uber ridership and Julia never saw her again.
The Imitator
Julia spent her first days at Cascine imitating what little she’d known of Lena’s presence there: emulating her easy familiarity with the chefs de cuisine; acting out the memory of her command over utensils.
In those earliest shifts, Julia felt – or felt as though she felt – the rest of the restaurant’s mostly male staff mentally adding and subtracting competency and attractiveness points to and from their fluctuating impressions of her, tallying up opinions relating to her appearance and character which, once formed, would be hard for her to ever improve upon.
At her previous restaurant of employ – the latest in a series of incorporated dining ventures executively co-managed by a celebrity chef known, in the industry, for the emotionally toxic atmospheres of his kitchens and increasingly, on the industry’s outside, for his strongly worded online free-speech punditry and resultant new-media fan base of neoconservatives – Julia had earned a reputation as an easy mark; a line chef overeager about the job and therefore manipulable into assuming responsibilities occasionally beneath, but more often than not well above, her pay grade.
She had been waiting to become the next version of herself at a new job for a long time, long months. She had to be careful, now she was here, not to fall back into old-Julia behaviours: not to reveal her true nature as a crier, pleaser and worrier; not to do or say the kinds of things the person she was pretending to be wouldn’t say or do. Not to let others’ views of her warp her view of herself. Not to be vulnerable in the places she had been before.
The Apartment
After her first full week of non-trial shifts, Julia returned home to be airily ‘Oh, hey’-ed by Margot – her landlord, flatmate, and older sister’s closest friend – who was lying in her ritual night-time position on the living-room sofa; her attention split-screened between her smartphone’s various feeds and an episode of prestige television streaming on her laptop.
The living room was moodlit in accordance with Margot’s preferred rotary dimmer setting, thirty degrees clockwise from exact midway, as demarcated by a Sharpied dot on the white plastic casing of the wall’s light switch.
‘How’s it going?’ Julia replied.
Margot leant awkwardly over to pause her show. ‘Oh, good. I’m just tired. How about— How’s things with you?’
‘Also good. Also tired. But good-tired. From the new job.’
‘Oh yeah. How’s it all—?’
‘Good so far. Very good so far.’
Usually if she arrived back in the evening and saw, from the hallway, the telltale Margot-signalling band of light running beneath the living-room door, Julia would head immediately to bed. She and Margot had not yet worked out a natural, non-strained way to communicate with one another; their relationship was probably permanently contaminated by the monthly standing-order payments Julia transferred to her for rent.
‘Better than the old place?’
‘Oh god, like, about a zillion times better,’ Julia said, the act of speech becoming increasingly wearying for her to perform.
‘That’s good. I’ll have to stop by and try it sometime.’
‘You must.’
‘I will.’
‘Cool. Well, goodnight.’
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