In the House Un-American by Benjamin Hollander

Author:Benjamin Hollander [Hollander, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566569279
Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group Inc

Carlos Returns to America to Dream the Right to Privacy and Eat Out among the Guest Workers

The silent guest worker waitress at Panini’s is always hovering—stuffing napkins in the condiment holder at Carlos’s table, begging to take his plate away, visibly disappointed when he says “no, I’m keeping it,” then moving to another customer and unrolling his table umbrella when the fog rolls in to this gated American beach community.

The irony is she has not, as the immigration minutemen of the twenty-first century like to think, crossed the border for a free meal ticket or to take “our” right to work away. Just the opposite—she works like a real American, perpetually trying to work in the country’s image of itself, a cog in the wheel, just doing her job under the unprecedented conditions of equality. She is the story of the overworker in America. She gets Carlos’s muffins to him as soon as he asks, and he wonders how, in a few years, she will articulate her frustrations at being treated like a slave, like any other guest worker in America. Will she be free enough to use the idioms she has studied in her community college ESL class, if she gets humiliated enough by the job?

Carlos imagines that one day he will hear her say something to the cook like “Boy, that customer outside is sooner or later going to get his comeuppance, if he’s not careful”— and she’ll be facile enough with the language to deny she said this when confronted by her boss, “Did you say that,” he’ll interrogate her, and she’ll say: “No, I’d never say that, boss, really, I said, that customer outside is sooner or later going to get his muffins.” And all is well, for the moment, for this future moment…

… But for now, all this time on the outside she has been eyeing her boss through the window, reflecting her need to look to him as if she’s busy and, in the process, disturbing the customers. It’s too much. Carlos thinks: she might get the picture if someone went up to her boss, maybe someone like Carlos who is just trying to eat his meal in peace, and told the boss that her determination to have him see her work (like a real American) is really getting on people’s nerves. Someone should do something about her. She can’t be here enough, Carlos grimaces, and it’s this way with most industrious service workers in America, he mumbles to himself—this denial of our right to privacy.

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