One in the Family
by Adrienne Perry
Museum District
“You have some experience with food prep?” asked Angus, the owner of Taco Heaven. He wore snakeskin boots and his jingle-jolly gut stretched a Clutch City T-shirt. Dad’s age or a little older. For this informal interview, we sat outside Black Hole, next to the laundromat, so that Angus could smoke. Rancheras played on the laundry’s radio, and I knew enough Spanish to get depressed by what those sisters were singing. Through the open door, the floral, pastel perfumes from detergents and dryer sheets mixed with Angus’s smoke. Toxic, but when was the last time I’d done laundry in actual machines, not secretly in the Y’s showers? Finals week. Now it was full-on June.
I said, “I washed dishes in the dining hall.”
Angus watched me attack the iced coffee and Southwest quiche he’d offered at the interview’s start. Raggedy, but dignified. Hungry. I knew how I looked. Trying to figure me out, Angus’s wide forehead wrinkled. It looked like kind confusion.
“I had an uncle who taught history at your school.”
“For real?”
“He’s retired now. It’s a good school.”
I nodded without smirking. “For most people.”
“What makes you special?”
No comment. I pushed my finger onto the crumbs and eggy bits on my plate. I’d eat whatever wasn’t strapped down.
“Would you say you’re any good with people?”
“I’m great with people.”
“Re’s an interesting name. Where’s it come from?”
I knew what Angus was getting at and I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. I showed him the backs of my hands. R (right hand) e: (left hand). “A nickname. Pronounced rey.”
“Like a ray of light? Like shafts through clouds? Like the Virgin Mary?”
“Like a king. I have to send money home each month. Can you remind me how much the pay is?”
Angus hired me because he felt sorry for me.
That was fine.
Summer in Houston is like the dead of winter in Easthampton, Massachusetts, only hot instead of cold. In both places, weather traps the lucky people inside. I tried to explain this to our dad, but he’s from Mississippi, so he already knew. End of my sophomore year and I talked about the heat because I didn’t want to talk about why I wasn’t going back. Not to school and not home. Macy had just returned from Afghanistan. When I say just, I mean a year. Staying in Houston was my way of pretending that everything would work itself out — for all of us.
The fusion-taco food truck was pitched to Dad as a paid internship. Small business administration, hospitality, team building, and sustainable food. Workday’s end, I would wring sweat from my Taco Heaven T-shirt and pocket fifteen wet dollar bills in tips. End of the month, I had saved enough to send home four hundred.
Dad said inquiring minds want to know: Were my supervisors nice? What was I learning about bookkeeping and advertising, about how to run my own business? I’d look at Wikipedia and memorize the difference between budgets and actuals in small business accounting. Make shit up — factoids about the history of tacos. Or Angus. I’d tell a story about my boss, say he was a felon who’d miraculously turned a corner in his life of crime, was mentoring me, showing me how to transform an idea into three edible dimensions. That was the summer I started telling grown-up lies. When your father launches a Kickstarter campaign to finance his oldest daughter’s Sip-N-Puff, he doesn’t want to hear that his other kid pays for a student membership at the downtown YMCA just to take showers and use the free Wi-Fi. He doesn’t want to hear they’ve been stalking their ex — financial aid officer, or that they’re sleeping on the street. No father wants to hear that. So I spared him.
Angus and I worked together five days a week. Taco Heaven employed no one else. Lemons and limes, edible flowers, and fruit dominated my workstation. Grilling and marinating meats, heating tortillas — Angus handled all that and chopped cilantro, whipped together salsas and fresh chutneys from mangos and allspice. I took orders and ran the register, cranked out a green-and-white awning, and, underneath it, set up an outdoor Ikea table plus two chairs for ambiance. Both of us cleaned. A winged hot-pink taco flew on the truck’s black side.
Every Tuesday, Taco Heaven camped out at the Museum of Fine Arts, between the parking lot and the sculpture garden. A small man-made hill sloped up to a mini plateau behind the truck, where a magnolia and ponderosa pine threw shade. On the grass beneath the tree branches, during my breaks, I would stare out at the sculptures, watching the guards on their breaks. We echoed each other.
A bronze man made of rectangles ran down a slope near a sick-looking naked boy riding a horse. The horse had a tiny head on a wrestler’s neck. The Pilgrim, the artist named the horse and boy, and I thought, That’s just like white folks. Not the sculpture, but the value of things and how they’re just for certain people. Gardens are green prisons and if I could steal that horse and sick boy and sell them to solve our money problems, I would. Without regret. If that’s racist or wrong or something, right about now I just don’t care.
A Tuesday was my first official day on the job, though I worked with Angus Mondays through Saturdays. The cicadas in the sculpture garden sounded like sirens for the buses and cars barreling down Bissonnet. A museum security guard sweating through his uniform leaned on the parking lot sign. The atmosphere inside the truck — how can I describe it? Stainless steel can hold onto heat with a death grip. A fluorescent light beat down like a tin hammer on the top of my head.
“Feels like a grown man tap dancing on your chest, doesn’t it?”
“Something like that,” I said, studying Angus’s map. Every food item or utensil had a home. Angus had systems and, within the first hour, I fucked those systems up. I’d read the map upside down.
“If you weren’t a girl... ” Angus shut himself up. I’ll give him that. He knew when to quit about that aspect. That first day, Angus didn’t know what to make of me. But by early July, he was talking about his favorite butch cousin from Chicago, full-sleeve tattoos on her arms, big diamonds in her ears, girls practically throwing their panties in front of her. He said, “If you weren’t a girl, you’d be toast.”
Before Macy came back from Kabul, this would have gotten to me. I would have licked the counter to apologize. But Macy put the world to scale.
“Good thing I’m not really a girl.”
“All right,” Angus chuckled, “have it your way. I’m just saying: awareness. So nobody gets hurt.”
I thought: That is my fucking way. I said, “I’ll be more aware.”
Angus cocked his head, searched my face, and waved a hand in front of his nose. “You’ve got what my nephew calls an ice grill, you know?”
“I have a decent sense of what my face is doing.”
“You ever been in?” Angus pointed to the museum. A fat line of schoolchildren snaked through the doors. “It’s an ugly building from the outside, but don’t judge a book. Am I right?”
Museums don’t intimidate me. Entering the MFAH lobby for the first time, I saw a Warhol self-portrait and a negative of myself, in the same moment. Against a black background, Warhol was pink, his hair stuck up like feathers in an Easter Sunday hat. A death mask expression on his face, like Macy’s when we picked her up at the Hartford airport. How much would a Warhol like that go for? What gave Warhol value? If I could figure that out, I’d start throwing paint on canvases.