THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 45when she tried to take home uneaten
pizza that she wet herself.
But Wilson and Pascarelli didn’t
shrink when Gluck barked. They didn’t
cry when he vented. Between them, Wil-
son had the tougher exterior. Pascarelli
was more yielding, and from a young age
had followed the lead of her older sister.
But there was a stoicism in both women,
an ability to withstand Gluck’s outbursts.
With her office next to Gluck’s, Wilson
endured his storming in and yelling loud
enough for workers on the meat slicer
to hear him. “I was a buffer, meaning if
there was a complaint between him and
a person, I would get the complaint and
I would go fix it,” Wilson testified in a
depo sition for the lawsuit.
Her fixes, according to the workers,
were punishments doled out with tiered
precision: dish duty for first-time offend-
ers, a school transfer for repeat offenders.
After a worker fractured her neck in a car
accident and missed a week and a half of
work, Wilson assigned her dish duty. The
worker handed in a doctor’s note saying
she needed light work. But Wilson would
not relent, and the worker assumed
that seeking help from the union would
be pointless: Pascarelli was the union
president. Eventually, the woman quit.
(Both Wilson and Gluck deny punishingworkers and say there is no such thing as light work
in a cafeteria.)
Wilson’s willingness to run interference for Gluck
made her essential. He came to consider her a close
friend, even as he bore down on her. She often said
she was going to work for the school district until she
retired. When there was trouble, it was either her job
on the line or someone else’s—and it wasn’t going to
be hers. Her stance was that of a woman who looked
out for herself, as the Italian women saw it, her stern-
ness a kind of hardness, like that of a man.
But phone calls from the New Canaan mothers
undid her. Gluck himself disdained the mothers. “I
don’t understand these fucking women in this town.
They put their little tennis skirts [on] and they go and
play,” he said, according to the testimony of Antonia
Torcasio, who managed one of the elementary- school
cafeterias. “And then they want me to worry about if
the kids have to eat gluten-free or not gluten-free.”
So it was Wilson who listened to them.
“They are good for nothing but just spending their
money,” Wilson would say after hanging up, Torcasio
told me. “They are rich and lazy. They don’t know
how to cook or do anything.” On and on she went,
as though she’d found a place to put everything that
Gluck dumped on her. (Gluck and Wilson deny say-
ing these things.)IT TOOK AMY KALAFA multiple phone calls and
some persistence to arrange an interview with Gluck.
He was in high demand. His program was the envy
of other districts. Food-services directors from acrossMarie Wilson (left)
and Joann Pas-
carelli (right)
arrived in the New
Canaan cafeterias
in the 1980s
and rose through
the ranks.PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE VOORHES; ASSOCIATED PRESS