Til Death Do Us Part

40

“I can’t do this!” I snap at Greta for the fiftieth time as water sloshes all over me, and I lose my grip of the plate I am attempting to wash and send it skidding across the huge steel tub before it smashes to smithereens. Cursing myself for first scalding my own hands with hot water and then managing to c***k three glasses that I dropped in the sink before I realized I should place them in carefully. I’m losing my last nerve. How is this so hard to master when it seems like a relatively straightforward task? Everything is so slippery, and this sink is like a bathtub; it’s so vast. I’m soaked all over, even through my apron, because of the way water slops up anytime I dip crockery into it.

“You’re such a quitter. Can you stop being such a drama queen and pipe down? We have a dinner party out there to impress.” Greta flicks bubbles at me as she leans in to grab a plate I have managed to stack on the rack successfully. The first that didn’t immediately slide off right back into this water and delivered me a face slap of foam. She’s jumping between cooking and serving today for a rare booking and has left me unsupervised. It’s someone’s birthday in the village, and we got the honor of being the venue.

“I hate this.” I moan for the umpteenth time, not happy with any of the manual tasks I have been doing these past few days. Nothing challenges me mentally, yet I feel like a completely useless i***t for not knowing how to vacuum or wring out a mop. I didn’t even know dusting was a daily thing or that laundry was such a complicated process of separating items. God forbid I try to cook again after I set the eggs on fire when I tried to scramble some in my first ever culinary lesson. I’ve always been a high achiever in everything, but this s**t right here has me tearing my hair out.

“Can’t half tell you were a princess in your previous life. Do you ever stop complaining? Suck it up, wench. I’ll make you clean the grease traps if you continue to whine.” She warns me and then bats me on the head with the plate as she walks off, and I throw a fistful of bubbles after her. Scowling her way and stamping my foot like a child.

Two weeks, two God-damned long and challenging weeks of an aching body and shattered temper daily, and I’m wondering what the f**k I was thinking. This is hell. All we do is clean, repair, cook, run around like idiots, doing what seem like menial and pointless tasks, all in the name of living. I’ve never wanted my mansion and housekeeper and my cushy office job more in my life. I can’t believe I ever viewed them as unimportant things and lived ignorant of how ordinary people survive. I’ve never lived without money and watching Greta be frugal and stretch out her earnings has blown my mind.

It’s insane that there’s such a divide between the classes, and I was brought up oblivious to it. People can get by on a measly income and spend minimal dollars on luxuries. One piece of my old clothing cost more than everything Greta owns.

It’s not the picnic I thought it would be, yet still, I don’t want to leave. I’m still not ready, and the longer it goes on, the more I begin to feel panicky and incapable of going back to face my old life. The responsibilities of everything, now absent, made me realize how weighed down and suffocated I was. How little my feelings mattered, and how it was expected that I take care of every problem and detail without question. The blame was always on my head, no matter what it was, and I was the one always to fix everything. I’m not constantly suffocated with responsibility for so many people. This taste of freedom, although physically tiring, is a hundred times easier to deal with mentally.

“You drive me crazy,” I yell after her and know it’s not her, but my inability to adjust and I feel inferior because of it. I watch these people come in and out of their fishing boats. Stack up at the harbor and work their asses off all day, without one single complaint. A grandmother of ninety-two, shelling seafood in the coldest of days for hours on end, and yet I stood for ten minutes and wanted to leave.

They’re a different breed of people entirely. They don’t feel the cold or blink at standing in the rain, oblivious to gale force winds. They spend all their time carrying things, fixing things, or looking for stuff to be doing to fill up any hours of daylight they have. It’s exhausting. They make it all look so endless and such hard work, and yet call it happiness. I have seen genuine contentment among them, something I never saw in my world.

“Hmmm. I don’t have time to care.” She blows me a kiss and heads back to the stove and places her dish among the twenty others before sharing out the clam stew on them all, and I turn back to my task and slap my hands into the sudsy pool with a vengeance. My temper has been yoyoing crazily since I left the hospital, and I know partly I’m still suffering from delayed shock and complications from my head injury, but it doesn’t ease my mood. I’m only now getting rid of the severe cold virus I got recovering from hypothermia.

“I used to have two hundred dollar manicures and moisturizing glove treatments, and I’m reduced to putting my hands into pink rubber and scraping other people’s food off dinnerware,” I mutter to myself, but she hears me.

“You’re a snob. If you miss it that much, the doors over there. Don’t let me stop you, and don’t let it hit you on the ass on the way out. I’ll tell the village you ran away because you’re a giant ungrateful wuss who’s afraid of dishwater!” She threatens me, and I eyeroll at her and go back to scrubbing like a maniac and slamming crockery on the rack.

“I’m not washing the floors today. It’s your turn.’ I snap at her and catch the fleeting little smile on her face because she knows I’m all hot air, and her threats are empty too. We’ve developed this bickering, married couple aura these past two weeks.

“You’re s**t at it anyway. You can clean the toilets instead.” She adds with an airy tone, and I blanche and spin back to stare at her in wide-eyed disgust.

“I’ll wash every floor. I’ll try harder.” I backtrack and return to silently cleaning, eyeing her up, and murmuring instead. She’s a slave laborer and a scary b***h at times, and she totally would make me clean a toilet bowl. I can’t think of anything worse. I’m not putting my hands down any of the restaurant lavatories, not even to save my life.

“Hmmm……Take those off and help me serve.” She calls over to me, and I obediently pull off my rubber gloves and dry my hands on my apron before walking over and holding my arms out. She’s been teaching me how to stack plates along my arms so I can carry four or six at a time, depending on size, and I’ve managed it twice without dropping any today. It’s the little goals that keep me going.

She balances them on me to help me out, three on each arm, overlapped precariously, and I move with the graceful walking speed of a snail as I inch my way towards the door of the kitchen.

“If you can master doing it before it gets cold, before the end of today, ill give you a gold star.” She laughs at my slow progress, and I frown.

“Shut up. I’m concentrating!” I hiss at her and turn to use my butt to get outside the swing door which separates us from the restaurant; being so careful, it’s like I’m carrying a sensitive bomb. Edging backward and eyes fully locked onto the steaming bowls on my outstretched limbs.

A sudden abrupt lower body impact hits me like a donkey kicking my butt, makes me scream out loud, and I throw my hands in the air as a small child collides with me dramatically.

There’s a crashing, banging, showering of clam chowder, and hysterical squeal as I’m completely drenched in hot, lumpy, fishy, disgusting liquid, and everything smashes around my ankles on the floor. Bouncing up at me and spattering my trouser legs and all the walls and doors around me. An explosion of seafood and soup manages to get in my eye and up my nose simultaneously.

“Sadie!!!! NO!! I told you to stop running around.” One of the village women who run a tiny grocery store yells at her devil child and offers no help at all to my pathetic figure, standing here wearing six servings of their food. The scalding food soaked through my thin attire and made my skin itch in reaction. I am open-mouthed, shocked, and building to the worst kind of angry reaction.

“Ughhhh, Sadie, baby. Kitchens are not for playing.” Greta appears at the door, soothing, looking me up and down with sympathy and dismay, and hands me a towel like it's going to have any effect on this mess or me. I yank it out of her hand and turn sternly to the feral little brat. Seething, covered in a slurry of liquids, and aware of half the restaurant staring at us.

“Don’t you know what sorry is? Or how to behave? Are you just going to cause all this and say nothing to me? Do you know how dangerous it is to run about in a restaurant, let alone right for the kitchen door?” I snap at her, cold and furious in a manner that I would address an adult employee who had pissed me off, uncaring about the crumpling of a small face and big watery eyes. I see Greta in the corner of my eye, sigh, and rub her temple.

Tiny terror bursts into instant tears, and her mother glares at me as though I’m the most horrible human being on the planet. Shielding her child from this monstrous lady and pulling her away like I’m the wicked witch of the north. She says nothing, but the silent judging, not only from her but all the customers looking this way, speaks volumes.

“She’s a kid, and it was an accident. No harm, no foul. Let’s all cool down and clean up.” Greta bends down and pats her on the head, smiling gently before wiping her tears, and it makes me rage all the more. She’s trying to diffuse the situation, but I’m not having any of it. I’m incensed.

“Teach kids to be responsible for their actions and don’t encourage crying every time she’s bad to get away with it. It’s an act. If you pander to it, she learns nothing.” I slam my hand on the countertop, scaring her half to death, and then storm back into the kitchen without a backward glance. Full-on rage is blowing out of me. I kick things out of the way as I march back to the sink to clean myself up, leaving the mess to them, seeing as it’s no big deal in their eyes and I’m taking nothing to do with scraping it off every surface.