by Michael Chouinard
He never, ever entered the lunchroom, Greta realized, as she unwrapped her tuna sandwich from its wax paper and started taking bites. She’d tried making conversation after she sat down with Rose and Maxine, the girls in bottling, but she was too reserved to keep up with their incessant mix of Twin City gossip, Hollywood news, even the war with the Axis Powers. When Mr. Lageröl came into the cafeteria though, she tuned out their chatter altogether.
Walter Lageröl was young, dashing, with immaculately parted hair and donning a fine pin-striped suit. He’d trimmed off the Clark Gable pencil-thin mustache that was his trademark, and Greta admired him all the more. He looked softer, gentler. His family had started Lagerol Beer—minus the umlaut—and after an injury left him with a pronounced limp, there was no way he could enlist for the war, so he took an office job with the family’s mid-sized Midwest brewery where he was now the head of accounts. He should’ve been running this whole shebang, she thought.
Maxine joshed Greta with an elbow to the ribs and said, “Too bad he’s a, you know . . .”
Caught in a stare, Greta could feel her face turn stoplight red. “What? A what?”
“A nelly!” Rose said, then covered her mouth, as a few girls at nearby tables looked over. These days it was mostly women working at the brewery, what with the gents off fighting Hitler and his brown shirts.
“No, no, he’s wounded,” Maxine whispered, pointing down to her private parts. “Can’t cut a rug either, the poor crumb!”
“Maybe we shouldn’t speak about this,” Greta offered, but the other two kept debating their theories, giggling to themselves, until Mr. Lageröl limped over to the table. “Ladies,” he said. “And how is your day?”
“Fine, Mr. Lageröl,” they sang like an Andrews Sisters chorus. Greta smiled at him, which brought a chuckle from Maxine. Meanwhile, Rose, pointing to Greta’s teeth, whispered, “You got a little something . . .”
“Good, good,” he told them, then headed for the door. “Keep up the fine work.”
Sensing green onion stuck between her incisors, Greta felt crushed, like an old beer can. She always found the most perfect opportunities to make a fool of herself. Moments later Mr. Lageröl, possibly looming in the hallway, asked to speak to her. “It’s about your status here, Miss Peinlich.”
“Oh?”
“No, no, you’re in good standing. This is regarding your position at Lagerol. I have to work late this evening, but at some point, I’ll be taking a dinner break. Would you like to join me?” he asked, then added, “if you’re available,” with a cough that suggested nerves, though she’d heard from Maxine he’d done time in a TB sanitorium as a youth.
“That’d be swell,” Greta said, beaming. “I mean, certainly, sir.”
“Where should we meet?”
“Hmmm, there’s a diner on my bus route home.”
She gave him the name and location, and he told her he would meet her shortly after she left work, giving her a little wink as he said, “Of course, the meal is on Lagerol Brewing.”
At day’s end, Greta untied the handkerchief from her hair, grabbed her purse, punched out at the time clock and hopped on the bus, wishing she could exchange her pants for a floral dress, maybe put rollers in her hair. There was still daylight, but the neon of the coffee cup sign outside the diner was already glowing. Even before she opened the door, she could see through the steamy glass he was there, rifling through office papers. That he’d chosen the counter and not a table dampened her spirits a little. When she walked inside, he waved and patted the stool next to her.
They made small talk about the day, how business was, and Mr. Lageröl—“You can call me ‘Walter’ here”—admitted surprise that she actually liked beer after she’d ordered a small glass, company brew of course.
“Gosh, lots of women like beer,” she said. “Well, maybe not lots, but more than you’d think. But not too much though—drinking at once, I mean. Course, I heard it helps moms breast-feed their babies, er, maybe that’s too personal,” she said, only sensing his embarrassment when he coughed up some suds.
“Perhaps Miss Peinlich, we could add a line of lighter lager for the ladies,” he said with an air of triumph. “Lagerol Light for the Ladies, how’s that for an advertising pitch? A real mouthful.”
“That could be a good pitch too,” she chuckled. “A real mouthful, I mean.” He looked perplexed, so she changed the subject. “You can call me Greta, too.”
As always, she was antsy, her palms clammy, sweat under her armpits, as happened any time she was alone with a man, which hadn’t been often, so she excused herself to go to the powder room to freshen up.
She wished she could’ve dolled herself up a little, as she wet her face and the back of her neck with cold water. For a second, she stared into the restroom mirror, turning from side to side. Tall, gangly, with a lower lip that protruded slightly and an overbite that jumped out when she laughed or smiled, on a good day, in a chipper mood, in the right light, she had a certain charm, more wide-eyed Irene Dunne than sultry Rita Hayworth, but she told her reflection there were uglier girls in the world. It was as if she was a bit out of proportion from every angle. On top of this, she had a couple of inches on Mr. Lageröl—Walter—and there was no advertising pitch to sell that. Anyway, he was either too much of a dandy or rendered impotent by injury, depending on what you believed.
As their food arrived, they set in to eat but kept up the small talk, and Walter admitted, “You’re a good brewer, a real humdinger. As good as a man. You could be a brew-master, or mistress, I suppose,” laughing at his own wordplay before ordering a coffee.
It was true, she was a good brewer, knew malts, what wort meant for flavor, the process of hopping, top and bottom fermentation, all of it. She loved being independent and was proud she could handle work many considered a man’s job. She’d started in the office, moved to the bottling line and finally to brewing. A descendant of beer people back in Germany, Catholics from Bavaria who’d moved north, she came by the trade honestly.
“Yes, I had relatives who worked at a brewery near Bremen. It’s called St. Pauli. You can’t buy it in the United States though, but we knew our beer. My father migrated to Ontario and grew hops, but he hated Canadians, said they’re bigots, too scared to fly a flag without the Union Jack, so he moved to America.”
“That doesn’t sound like our neighbors to the north,” Walter said, sipping his coffee.
“It’s true. They changed the name of our town in the last war, though mostly Germans lived there. Only a small number voted, but it’s now called Kitchener. The soldiers even beat up a German minister, and someone threw a statue of the Kaiser in a lake. I wasn’t born yet, but my father tells these stories, going on about mean-spirited Canadians. He keeps hush about being German these days though. I try to too, I suppose. It just confuses or upsets people.”
“Such a shame. These countries were built by immigrants, like you and me. Or our parents and grandparents.”
Greta nodded at him, then looked at the glass case on the wall, pondering dessert, until Walter said something that threw her off her guard.
“You know you’re quite a handsome woman,” he said. “You’re no Brunhilde brandishing a battle axe.”
The boldness of his observation was like a blast of icy water. She gagged on the last crumbs of cutlet in her mouth and banged on her chest, then coughed to clear her airway.
“Hold your arms up,” he said, hoisting his own in the air like some referee signalling a Green Bay Packer touchdown.
After another hack, she could breathe and thanked him for the compliment, though she didn’t know how to take it. Handsome? Not pretty or voluptuous? Why didn’t he just call her industrious, a hard worker, one of the gents—though not one of the boys overseas fighting Hitler?
“Are you okay now?” As he said this, he rested his hand on her shoulder and she flinched, then gave him a nod, saying, “Jeepers, it just got all stuck for a sec.”
“Well, some date I turn out to be,” he said. “I’m only teasing, about the date part, I mean.”
“Teasing, OK,” said Greta, wondering what to think.
Walter waved to the waitress to order dessert, then resumed talking about competing with the Anheuser-Busches, Schlitzes and Pabsts, or what war might do to production supplies, while she smiled and nodded, feigning interest, though she couldn’t stop questioning whether this dinner was business or personal.
“Lagerol is still family-run,” she interjected. “Do you think it will always be so? I know you don’t have children.”
Cocking an eyebrow, he frowned. “The jury, I must say, is still out on that.”
“But, how . . . I thought you couldn’t . . .” Greta was grasping for words, but only the wrong ones were offering their services at that moment.
Walter looked down into his plate for a few seconds. “Wait, do you think I can’t have children, Miss Peinlich? I must say this comes as news to me.”
Here she was, damned near fermenting in her own sweat, laughing anxiously, trying to back-track. “I hear things . . . you were injured in an industrial accident, which is why you limp, that you can’t have children, or even . . . you know,” she said, unable to stop herself. “Oh, my, I am so sorry, sir. The nuns would yank out my tongue if they could hear me, or give me a good smack on the hand. I’m asking too many personal questions. Will you excuse me? I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Greta bolted for the ladies’ biffy one more time. Inside, she could hear “Jitterbug Waltz” playing on a radio somewhere and took a few drags on a cigarette, leaning back against the vanity, talking to herself. “Maybe this is a date. Oh, God, what must he think? How could I ask him those questions? What a numbskull!”
The door of a stall flew open and an older woman with smudged lipstick trudged out, half-staring at Greta while washing up at the vanity, and on the way out she said in a beaten, raspy voice, “Hang on to that man, Dearie. All the good ones are overseas, and if they’re lucky, still breathing.” As the door closed, the woman kept muttering, “Men—such trouble . . .”
Greta mashed out her cigarette in the sink, and it just sunk in that her whole backside was damp from water that had sloshed onto the vanity. As she walked back to the counter, she held her purse straight behind her to cover her derrière, so no one, especially Walter, would see what a mess she was.
The dessert had arrived and Walter was already eating. As she sat down, she apologized for inquiring about things that were none of her business.
He smirked, hoisting a forkful of pie, and shook his head. “You should ignore those busybodies at the brewery and all their idle chatter. A flock of old hens, if you ask me. Maybe I have to speed up those production lines to keep them occupied, teach them a lesson not to gossip. What do you think?”
Feeling relieved, she smiled and started to eat her pie, until he added, “The only thing that is limp is my leg.”
At that little bit of innuendo, she lost her fork, which dropped and hit the edge of her coffee cup, catapulting a large morsel of lemon meringue pie through the air. The yellow lump landed right smack on the pages of a newspaper that a businessman down the counter was reading. The man said nothing, only shook his head, as they apologized and suppressed their urge to laugh.
Walter signalled for the waitress to get another fork, but Greta replied she was full, so he settled up at the cash register, and as they turned toward the entrance, she was certain he was eyeing up her backside. “Oh, Lord,” she told herself, realizing he could see the wet spot.
Once he noticed that she had noticed him, he averted his eyes and apologized. “Oh, my, not very gentlemanly of me,” he said, then bumped into the glass door.
Outside, the sun, too, was ready to clock out for the day, leaving the downtown neon to fill up as much of the darkness as it could. The two exited the diner, she starting one way toward her bus, he another, and she felt the evening held a note or two of optimism, like a bouncy big band tune to keep her toes tapping all the way home.
Heading toward his automobile, Walter stopped and yelled back, “Thank you, Greta, for providing a lovely diversion this evening. I enjoyed myself but must return to the office. I should tell you, sorry to say, it’s against Lagerol policy for managerial types to date the workers.”
All she could do was smile back and wave, feeling a little disappointed but still a little buoyant, until he shouted something else.
“But this war won’t last forever, Greta,” he said to her, and as she stepped up into the bus, her clammy hands fumbling to grip the railing, she let these words sink in, trying to take the smallest sip of what this all would mean one day, but the taste started to sour the second after he added, “You’ll not be working for us at Lagerol forever. Of that, I am certain.”
© 2024 Michael Chouinard All rights reserved.
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