Gazebo
Jory Pomeranz
On this street in South Hampton there are hedges on either side, growing up so tall as to force migrant workers to stand on the top rungs of their ladders on their toes while bracing their arms to stabilize their bodies to clip the tippy-tops of them so that they are, of course, perfectly flat. Driving down the lane nobody’s house can see anyone else’s house except in the small glimpse a passerby gleans from a driveway. The horticulture is some kind of competition—like the space race between Russia and the United States—that their gardeners conduct sub-rosa.
Did you see the begonia bush outside Janet Mark’s house?
Yes.
I wonder who they had do that…
The house is white with a driveway made of zillions of pebbles, which have to be raked back into place after a week of tires divoting them out of the way.
* * *
From the main house one cannot take in the majesty of the mansion itself. Properties can be enormous in the Hamptons, which creates a lot of negative space, making everything look smaller and less important. A gazebo is a mid-pacific archipelago, like Midway or Hawaii. From this tinier replica of the main house, one can see all the grandeur of the real, much larger, less toy-house. They can also see the pool, the tennis courts, and the driveway. The gazebo is a kind of hash-mark so visitors may yardstick the size of their neighbor’s ownership, the expanse of wealth. A lot of these rich people play golf, so I imagine from the main house they’d estimate from gazebo to the pool to be 100 yards out, the gazebo is flagged at 180-200 yards, and the pond must be about 300 yards.
* * *
There are a few families, like the one I’m working for in South Hampton, who want their servants exactly when they want them, and then they must be completely invisible. We all gather in the kitchen when we aren’t servicing the family. Diana, the woman of the house, says we are like the “cuckoo birds in a clock” that pop out at the right time or “magician’s assistants” to “only be there when she needs us.”
These are the verbatim, ingenious analogies she draws, gazing out into space somewhere between an armoire and fourteen-foot sofa but not quite out the window, which is maybe twenty yards too far. She stares somewhere between them, where inspiration hides, as if she’s plucked a truly creative thought out of hiding and into existence, out of thin air.
* * *
Diana is a retired television-show host for an interior decorating program for TLC. After bad ratings foreclosed her house-flipping show, she decided to become an aspiring writer. Writing is for everyone; it is an equalizer. Although she hasn’t written anything to completion in twelve years. I suspect it’s more of a coping mechanism for diminishing self-importance in the face of the public eye. Talk shows end and someone is suddenly a has-been for, you know, that show. Actors go off Broadway and afterward only hollowly get to call themselves actors until, as serendipity would have it, they get to pretend to be a singing cat again. Yet a writer can always be a work in progress. Becoming a writer can take a lifetime. Which is convenient for Diana because it affords her the convenience of always being on the verge of something “really, really, really…great,” or so Diana tells me.
My profession, cooking, is not so easily appropriated as a mantle. If someone asked me over dinner, “Oh, you are a chef, what are you cooking?” I could never respond, “Well, it’s kind of a meandering holocaustic work about eggs getting poached from their families, beaten, then baked in an oven; I whisk a chapter of this culinary exegesis into existence every morning with four hungry editors.”
Cooking has immediacy and physicality. Technique has a clear rubric for impeachability—is it a quarter-inch dice or a half-inch? Does the yolk run? Is it rare? What is the size, temperature, texture of everything? Performance is a clear deadline: breakfast, lunch, dinner. Cooking cannot be bullshitted professionally, which is both the most daunting and comforting aspect of this career, inherent action: cooking is done.
* * *
Diana spends most of her time in the mornings on Amazon or other shopping networks. Every two days or so, the front entrance looks like Christmas morning, and breaking down boxes takes an hour and processing returns. This is Amy’s job, Diana’s assistant and “housing manager” for the house. I hear her working with the box-cutter quietly as not to disturb Diana on her phone. I close the door to prepare Diana’s green juice, smoothie, coffee, and eggs benedict.
Diana is a Southern blonde and her irises are blue. She wears an aquamarine necklace, a crème-colored shirt tucked into her white jeans, both of them with shiny golden buttons. By the face above her right butt-cheek one can spot a Versace; above it is the logo of the Medusa. Their house in the Hamptons is a temple to interior decorators. Professionals who disagreed on each other’s paid-for opinions manicured her coffee-table books, the space between her sofas, whether the silverware went with the dining room table. I once spent an hour waiting to move furniture while fellow designer and Diana deliberated on the negative space of a bathroom wall. Even the dog seemed like a fixture of her décor, a blonde Weimaraner. She describes the décor of the house as a monarch’s farmstead because many antiques trace their lineages back to European high society and royalty.
* * *
There are five servants working inside the house every day: two maids, a chef, a nurse, and a “housing manager” whose job it is to manage the employees of the house. Two other maids rotate in and out occasionally and are on payroll, but only two are ever in the house at one time. We are servants and they are rich, but their more liberal sensibilities seem to flinch at the words. The word “servant” is exchanged for “employee” while the word “rich” is exchanged preferably for “affluent” or “blessed” during dinnertime graces. We are “employees” of the house; it’s a more sterile word. Perhaps Diana’s lexical prowess is “really” much savvier than I realized. An “employee” can be fired without any regard to the impact of termination on their family or life. A servant, however, this word is flavored by a Victorian continuity. One is responsible for their servants: the groundskeeper’s son needs a benefactor, a hundred shillings, so one day he may become a gentleman.
Such is not our fate—we’ll always be Mexicans to her behind whatever lexicon window-dressing suiting her. Employees. Having “servants”' as a plutocrat is out of vogue. The other servants are Brenda, Miriam, and Amy. Brenda emigrated here from Honduras, where she has a master’s degree in architecture, but the value of a degree doesn’t translate here. Some mornings she brings pupusas for us from a restaurant her boyfriend works at, and we hide the Styrofoam container in the dryer of the service room off the kitchen, designated solely for kitchen towels and linens. The dryers have their own private room only for those linens, while the kids’ clothing and bedsheets get washed in the basement.
We slide the designer “barn” kitchen door shut, then slide the miniature “barn” kitchen-laundry room door shut so we’re all packed into the stall together, huddled around the steaming Styrofoam box filled with golden medallions of Masa Harina filled with Cotija cheese and slow-roasted pinto beans, chicken stewed overnight in pasilla chiles. We say a prayer. Brenda and I talk shit about Diana, and Miriam laughs in her older “God loves everyone” voice.
Brenda and I anticipate each other’s questions during this ritual with the intention of giving ourselves more time with the dollop of sour cream. If you ask the question, the person talking gets less food. Then we slide the door open and work on our list of chores to be done before anyone else in the house awakens. Diana hasn’t complained yet that the tablecloth smells like refried beans.
* * *
All the wine glasses have to be equally spaced right-side-up on individual coasters in the cabinet designated for wine glasses of that height; the silverware drawer is custom made to tilt each divot so the forks all collect perfectly over one another, invisible one behind the other; the napkins must be folded into pentagonal rounds with the initials facing up, then fanned out so upon opening the drawer, a napkin can be selected instead of grabbed. These rules permeate every part of my job: setting the table, cleaning up the kitchen, sweeping the floor. There are particular products, motions, spacing, times, breaths to take during all of these chores.
Over the course of a few weeks, I find myself looking at the world around me and saying to myself, “Diana wants” and “Diana wants it like that” and “This is how Diana wants it.”
* * *
After lunch service ended, Miriam and I split a donut in the napkin-washing room. She told me she spent thirty minutes looking for Augustus’s stuffed zebra. She didn’t know what a zebra looks like, she’d never seen one in her life.
“No conoces a una cebra?”
“No, qué es?”
“Parecido a cabayo pero está pintada, rayada—it’s painted.”
We found an animal book of Auggie’s, and I showed her a zebra for the first time in her life. Her eyes sparkled like marbles.
“Qué preciosa…mira esa creación de dios.”
I slowly nibbled on the donut as to avoid eating my way into Miriam’s portion. We moved on to talk about her childhood in Oaxaca, Mexico. She talked about all the aromatic, dried chiles. She would plunge her little arms as a girl into the giant canvas sacks, trying to touch the bottom. Now she is an older woman living in Queens; she works this job so her son can afford college. She is a single mother in her late fifties.
I use the donut to point to the lump on her shoulder. Lifting the collar of her dress, she shows me the lump has been biopsied. She doesn’t seek treatment because the first chemo sessions made some of her teeth fall out. She says it made her feel like she has a bomb in her heart. I never stare at her mouth, but I always look her in the eyes. Her sweetness in her genuine attitude makes her beauty felt, even with the progression of her disease. She assents to Diana’s commands like a gracious nun, and Diana asks her not to smile around guests.
* * *
Frank works as a “venture capitalist,” aggregating pensions from unions: public school teachers, municipal workers, and social workers. By pooling their money with other plutocrat portfolios, a hedge fund of over a billion dollars is created with quite a bit of market influence, according to him. It is the consummate fiscal invention: take the retirement money of teachers, add it to your own money, promise them higher returns than their pension interest, invest it alongside your money and the money of your rich plutocrat friends. When the portfolio does well, give these pensioners enough of the money to indeed make more than 3% annually, yet give an inordinate amount to your more demanding “affluent” friends and to yourself for creating this marvelous opportunity. You and your family live off the fat of all these profits.
Tell me this isn’t a perfect understanding of economics. This is how my paycheck is written: my plating of a wild cod, line-caught off the coast of South Hampton and promptly clubbed to death, this fragrant bouquet of carrots and celery accented by fresh tarragon butter, this plate arrives at the table in my hands paid for by the New York City Public School Teachers’ Union. This is also how the laundry gets done, dinner parties get thrown, toys get bought, wine gets ordered.
I’m equally guilty for participating, agreeing to bite my tongue and accept this money under the table. On a more frivolous level, letting a capitalistic aristocracy define the soft language that will leave them guiltless. Stealing is called investment, rich is affluent, anal-retentive boss is called obsessive-compulsive disorder. There is not a wrongdoing that cannot be expunged with the right word or clinical diagnosis. I’m going crazy working here. The maids have started calling me a coo-coo bird, and I refer to them as my magician’s assistants.
* * *
At the end of summer, Diana threw a luncheon. All of Diana’s guests are the same non-working, non-housekeeping, non-parenting debutantes gilded to the lilies in opulent jewelry. They are all seated in the gazebo. The appetizer was a bibb lettuce salad with a dill yogurt dressing and fried capers. Followed by lamb koftas with currants and roasted garlic. The lamb was spiced with salt, pepper, cinnamon, cumin, fresh mint, and Aleppo chilies. The dessert was a Turkish baklava that had a vanilla crème base; the glassy, crisp texture of the filo shell barely held up to a fork so as not to spread the cream.
Miriam was my assistant for the afternoon, shuttling plates back and forth across the lawn. Due to the distance, it would take both of us delivering plates and simultaneously removing the previous course. I can see the work is hard on Miriam: the gazebo is far away, she is sweating, and her gait is inconsistent. Diana has already asked for tinier forks for the salad, which gives Miriam another trip across the lawn, and I scramble to figure out what drawer is devoted to the tiniest forks. “Diana wants” is being subliminally checked off in my head when I find them neatly stacked.
We get the first length of dessert delivered when Diana shows up at the kitchen barn-door. The Weimaraner took a shit under the table, and Miriam has to remove it. Following Miriam with more dessert plates, we cross the lawn once again, up the entrance to the gazebo.
The debutantes were talking about breast cancer, which was “terrible”; like poverty, which was “just terrible”; and certain high-end restaurants, which were “simply terrible” too. I was picking up the champagne glasses from the living room. Miriam was on all fours, accidently being kicked by shoes more expensive than her paycheck, picking up the dog shit so her son could afford college while the women above the tabletops licked their shiny teeth for bits of vanilla while admiring each other’s liberal sensibilities.
I got back into the kitchen and washed the champagne glasses and started drying them by hand. Miriam came back in silently to help me place them in the cupboard on their individual coasters according to Diana’s wishes, then I think she went to the bathroom to cry. I imagine the wall in front of her was empty, and she didn’t notice or mind.
Diana came into the kitchen after the guests had left and said, “The baklava—you know what is the problem with them? They are too rich.”
“Yes, that is the problem,” I said.
* * *
Frank called me into their bedroom to talk business before I left for the bus station to catch the Hampton Jitney. He said I did a really great job serving his family this summer; he wanted to hire me full time. I couldn’t look him in the face because I hadn’t been paid yet, so I stared at the patterns.
“You are unique because you speak Spanish fluently and you are a citizen,” he said. “I’ve been trying to correct that risk in our whole operation, but I’m having difficulty finding people.”
This means I’ve been trying to terminate the illegal immigrants who work for our family, but it’s difficult to find Americans who are in the same hapless economic and legal situation that encourages our pride-swallowing obedience.
* * *
Frank had his private car pick me up to take me to the bus station. I stared out the window and helped myself to one of those free mini-waters to wash down the Robitussin-like flavor of disgust that crept into the back of my throat. My nerves and muscles slacked for the first time all summer, and the corners of my mouth stopped pulsing from having to smile meekly, always wearing a face that wasn’t mine. We rolled out of the driveway, leaving divots of expensive pebbles in our wake for someone else to clean up.
I found myself staring out the window at the orchards South Hampton was famed for before so many apple trees got gentrified by rose bushes and hedges. It was picking season and the ladders were out. The field workers were slipping their caramel arms between the leaves to their shoulders to get them down while they chatted with one another, scooping their bounty up, the flies staying crowned around their ball caps and sun hats. The Galas and Junos hung like nature’s ornaments, pregnant with the sugar of spring. I could see the golden zebra stripes running down the fruit, and the reddish hues looked majestic.
Then we passed another community, and the hedges made it all disappear.
about the writer
Jory Pomeranz has a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. He was accepted to the Kenyon Writers Workshop’s advanced fiction seminar with E.J. Levy in June 2017. In 2018, he attended The Iowa Writers Workshop studying fiction with Charles D’Ambrosio. His work is published in Entropy Magazine, The Penmen Review, Ponder Review, Thin Air, and Origins Journal.