“Limp?”
“Just a little.”
“Oh my God, you're right,” he said, taking the kohlrabi back and staring at it. “You are just exactly right. Thank you so much. Really, you'll never know what you've done for me tonight.”
“Okay,” I said.
We shook hands, and I wheeled my cart away. I didn't even know what kohlrabi tasted like or how you cooked it — this was the kind of thing I would've asked my dad, if he were around to ask. But he wasn't. I finished up the shopping and was standing in the express line when the man came up behind me. I didn't have many items in my cart, and nothing fancy. His was full of kohlrabi and gourmet cheeses.
“This is very crisp,” he whispered. “I think she's going to be happy, my wife.”
“Good,” I said.
“You eat very plainly,” he said.
“We live in an age of austerity,” I told him.
He looked surprised. “We do?”
“Well, my mother and I do,” I said. She told me this all the time. I started putting the groceries on the conveyor belt. It was what my mom called peasant food, or life's necessities. I couldn't help staring at the decadent foods, like Pop Tarts and Ruffles, that other people had in their carts.
He nodded. I looked over at him and saw that his gray T-shirt and jeans were neatly ironed.
“I'm Mr. Dejun,” he said.
“Aggie.”
We shook hands and shuffled forward in line.
He unloaded his kohlrabi behind my stuff. “So what do you do with yourself when you aren't coming to the aid of strangers in grocery stores, Aggie?”
“Well, right now, I'm supposed to be looking for a job.”
“Is that right?” said Mr. Dejun. “What kind of job? Can you type?”
I didn't see why not. “I guess so.”
“I'd like to hire you, Aggie,” he said. “I could use someone with your outgoing personality and discriminating eye for produce. Come see me tomorrow.” He pulled a business card out of his jeans, and I put it in my pocket, then we shook on the deal.
I was at his office by nine the next morning. His company, Dejun Enterprises, Inc., was a private environmental testing firm. They tested just about everything you could think of — water, soil, air, machinery, fabrics, textiles, even once, he confided, condoms. As soon as I got there Mr. Dejun took me on a tour of the place, through all the labs where technicians in white coats hovered over long orange counters covered with Bunsen burners and petri dishes and test tubes, just like the labs at school.
“Listen, if you can think of something that needs to be tested, we'll test it for you. That's our attitude here at Dejun Enterprises, Inc. We test things that have never been tested before, and we test 'em cheaper than anybody else. Never turn a job down. Listen, Aggie, I've been in business for a long time, and one thing I've learned is that you always have to be willing to take the cus-tomer's money. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
He led me down hallways and into the employee lounge. I was completely disoriented, but somehow we wound up back in the reception area. There was a frowning, wrinkled woman sitting at the desk wearing a headset, apparently to leave her hands free for smoking. Her ashtray was full of cigarette butts. Next to the desk was a free-standing fishtank. Its water looked alarmingly gray, and I wasn't sure whether there were fish in it or not.
“Sophia, you're free,” said Mr. Dejun. “The cavalry is here.”
“Yippee,” said Sophia, not moving.
“She loves me,” Mr. Dejun told me.
“She's a young one, isn't she,” said Sophia.
“Hi, I'm Aggie,” I said, and shook her hand. She didn't really shake back.
Mr. Dejun said, “Sophia is actually not the receptionist, she's our accounts payable czaress. She is the Diva of Debts, aren't you, darling?”
“Sure,” said Sophia.
“She loves me. The point being, Aggie, that she's just filling in because we had to, ah, part with the receptionist. But now we have you for the summer and we don't have to hire a new receptionist until fall. Isn't it great, Sophia?”
“Good morning, Dejun Enterprises,” said Sophia. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at Mr. Dejun.
“What happened to the receptionist?” I said. I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and saw some fish emerging from behind the plastic plants of the tank. They looked okay in spite of the secondhand smoke.
“She was a terrible liar. Are you a good liar?”
“Pretty good, I guess,” I said.
“Only pretty good?”
“Actually, I'm an excellent liar. The ‘pretty good’ part was a lie.”
Mr. Dejun tilted back his head and laughed. His long gray hair was stiff and bristly and maintained its shape when it moved, like a cloud formation. I could see the backs of his teeth.
“You know, I'm really starting to get a kick out of you, young Aggie. Now listen. We get a lot of calls here, a lot of calls. And we can't always take them, right? We're only human, and there are only so many hours in a day. So sometimes we'll come to you and say, ‘If so-and-so calls, I don't want to talk to him, tell him I'm in a meeting.’ Now if I were to say that to you, what would you do?”
“Tell him you're in a meeting.”
“Excellent! That is exactly the right answer. You're brilliant, Aggie. You are really terrific.”
“What did the old receptionist say?”
“It turned out that she was a very devout woman who refused to lie. She'd say, ‘Yes, he's here, but he doesn't want to talk to you right now.’ Nothing about meetings. You've got to respect her integrity, but man-oh-man did we have a lot of pissed-off people on the phone.”
Sophia gave me five minutes of training and then left me on my own, carrying her big ashtray with her down the hallway. The reception area was separated from the rest of the building by almost-walls that stopped about a foot from the ceiling. I was alone. Mr. Dejun was right — the phone rang all the time. Mainly I had to find out what it was they wanted tested and transfer them to the appropriate lab. There were labs for textiles, for chemical compounds, for river water and for drinking water. Besides transferring calls, mainly what I did was lie. I hadn't even been up there for an hour before people started coming up front to introduce themselves, saying things like, “If that jerk from San Miguel Water calls, tell him I'm out working in the field today.” Everyone who worked at Dejun seemed to be ducking somebody — clients, spouses, or accountants. Reports and results and bills were always overdue. This was how I got to know most of the people who worked at Dejun, through all the lies I told on their behalf. I did it all the time, fluently and convincingly. It was kind of exhilarating. I told Lucy and Karen it was creative work.
Within days, life settled into a routine. I rarely saw Mr. Dejun, and then only when he was striding out the front door to meet a client for lunch, wearing small, beautiful gray suits. I wondered if he had to get them custom-made, since he was so short. Or maybe they were hemmed for him by the Queen of Kohlrabi. I punched a time clock and ate my lunch in the smoky employee lounge with the lab techs and accounting clerks and got paid every second Friday. I wore hose. It was like a game of real life. At five I'd head home and collapse on the couch, refusing to speak to my mother except in nods and hand gestures.
“I talk all day,” I'd whisper exhaustedly, hand to my forehead. “Please, no more.”
“Oh, you poor working stiff,” my mother would say. “Get changed and let's watch the game.”
Lucy and Karen were working nights during the week, so Mom and I spent the evenings slumped on the couch, watching TV and drinking beer. I'd never drunk beer in front of my mom before, but it didn't seem like a big deal. After all the stuff that had gone wrong, who could worry about a minor issue like the legal drinking age? We didn't hear anything from my father or Margaret. Apparently they were still sorting out whatever needed to be sorted. Mom and I didn't talk about him much. Mostly we talked about the Dodgers.