Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,28
some girls brought with them from home.
She had always loved Maria and Delmi, the Salvadoran women who worked full-time in the kitchen. If she hadn’t had their familiar faces in her life while her friends were gone, Sam wasn’t sure how she would have managed.
They had both worked at the college longer than Sam had been alive. But she tended to think of the kitchen as belonging to Maria.
Delmi had no end of friends who worked in other dorms, who stopped by throughout the day, whispering to one another in Spanish. She worked hard but was always happy to stop what she was doing and chat. Sam had once come upon her alone in the kitchen softly singing a Bon Jovi song into her cell phone in an attempt to win concert tickets from a local radio station.
Maria commanded authority in a way Delmi did not. Any outsider wandering in—a delivery guy with a cart full of boxes, a student worker from another dorm—instinctively approached her with their questions. Maria was petite and full of energy, a coiled spring. She had a pretty face and shiny brown hair and ripped upper arms. She always went above and beyond. She organized the pantry and alphabetized the recipe cards. She memorized the names of all the new students right away each September.
Sam’s mother liked to commend people who were particularly good at their jobs. Waiters, doctors, customer-service reps.
“It doesn’t matter what the job is,” she had told her children on many occasions. “It’s how well you do it that matters. I see it at the hospital all the time. Might be an orderly or a surgeon—some people just give their work their all. It makes life better for everyone around them.”
Sam told Maria this once, shyly. She said Maria made her think of it.
Of all the student workers in the kitchen, Sam had always been Maria’s pet. When she was working there her first year and started crying from homesickness, Maria hugged her and fed her cookies and made her laugh. She did the same when Sam’s grandmother died sophomore year. She asked Sam to bring back a rose from the funeral and had it pressed into rosary beads. When Sam passed the one math prerequisite she was forced to take to qualify for Latin honors, Maria presented her with a homemade cheesecake as a reward.
At the start of Sam’s junior year, when Maria introduced her to the newest member of the kitchen staff, the girl looked Sam up and down and said, “I know who you are. You’re Auntie Maria’s little favorite.”
“Sam, meet Gabriela, my charming niece,” Maria said, rolling her eyes.
Gabriela looked like Maria, but taller. She wore a diamond stud in her nose. Sam soon learned that she was twenty-three and had a baby, Josefine, a chubby one-year-old whose photograph Maria taped next to the weekly menu posted above the salad bar.
The photo was supposed to serve as a reminder to Gabriela. Maria was constantly telling her to watch her tongue, to take a deep breath before speaking.
All the student workers in the kitchen found her intimidating. Including Sam, at first. Gabriela made no secret of the fact that she didn’t have time for the stupidity of college girls who lived like slobs, assuming someone else would be there to clean up their messes.
Every day at lunch and dinner, Gabriela neatly filled the metal squares in the salad bar—the large one that held the greens, the four at the end containing different kinds of dressing, and the smaller compartments for things like sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, croutons, shaved carrots. Ten minutes into any meal, it was all a jumble. Gabriela would come out of the kitchen scowling and fix it so that no one would complain that there was tuna in the cottage cheese or Creamy Ranch in the Low-Fat Italian. Then the next wave of diners would mess it up, and she’d reemerge. Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill only to watch it roll down again.
Sam shared her frustrations.
When a senior from Connecticut left a puddle of Diet Coke on the floor under the soda dispenser, and Gabriela said, “Do these college girls wipe their own asses, or do they pay someone to do that too?” Sam silently thrilled at the comment.
When a transfer student asked, a bit rudely, for Gabriela to bring her some salt, she responded, “You’ve got legs in those yoga pants. Get it yourself.”
Sam burst out laughing then. Gabriela looked at her, as