70 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
The year Kate and I worked at the rib joint, you could see my ribs. I lost weight
without even realizing it. By November, my khaki work pants slid down my hips if my
belt wasn’t tight enough. I went from a size 6 to a size 4 to a size 2.“i’ve figured it out,” another server said to me one day in February as we
wrapped silverware near the end of a long lunch shift. “What’s that?” I asked, wiping a
pink fleck of rib off a knife that didn’t get completely clean in the dishwasher. He wore
his wiry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a smudge clouded his thin-rimmed
glasses. “You and Kate. You’re in love with her, right?” He looked across the restaurant
at Kate, carrying a tray of food from the kitchen. It made me angry that I was the one
at fault, the one in love.
In November, Kate’s parents drove from Florida for Thanksgiving. Before they
arrived, Kate asked if she could tell her parents I was gay, to help them understand why
she was having a hard time, why she seemed upset when they talked on the phone over
the past few months. “That’s fine,” I said, feeling my body tense as I said it. I hated that
she was making me the problem.
I placed the knife and a clean fork onto a napkin, trying not to seem thrown by my
co-worker’s comment. “No, I’m not in love with her.” I folded the napkin tightly so
it wouldn’t open when I placed it with the others in the basket. Before he could press
any further, a customer flagged him down from a booth in his section. I watched Kate
walking back toward the kitchen. I wonder now what was written across my face as I
looked at her.the one ritual I practiced the year Kate and I worked at the rib joint was drinking
hot black tea.
One day after work, I noticed a strange smell in our apartment: something rotten,
but an unusual rotten. A rotten I didn’t recognize. Like a dead fish, but not quite.
In search of the smell, I walked around our small kitchen. I poked inside the garbage
can; I opened the made-for-small-living-spaces refrigerator; I looked in cabinets. Fi-
nally giving up, I heated some water to make tea, planning to drink it in the bedroom,
where I could shut the door to keep out the mysterious rotting smell.
I didn’t laugh when I opened the metal sugar tin I had inherited from my grand-
mother. I didn’t laugh when I dipped a teaspoon into it. I didn’t laugh when I found a
small dead octopus buried in the sugar.
Holding my nose, I scooped it out. Its suction-cupped, purple-gray arms drooped
over the sides of the spoon. The iron smell of its rotting tentacles had infused the entire
half-pound of sugar.
“It’s a joke,” Kate said when I presented her with the octopus after she got home from
her shift. On Kate’s trip to North Carolina to visit Brian the previous weekend, they’d
tried a Japanese all-you-can-eat buffet for dinner, she told me as I held the octopus up
in front of her. To r i b is “to joke,” “to tease.”