The Cheese Brigade

The final story in our fifth fiction week. Keep scrolling to get caught up!

Abigail Welhouse is a poet and writer based in Brooklyn.

Mary loved working at the co-op. Her new job, which she did for three hours, once a month, was cutting giant wheels of Parmesan cheese. It wasn't a paid job. She exchanged her labor for discounts on food, including but not limited to the best cheese you can get without having to fuck a cheesemonger. The first time that Mary carried one of the fifty-pound wheels out of the refrigerator, along with the help of a staff member, someone asked to take a picture. Mary didn't take a picture, but only because she was afraid of being unprofessional. Mary was also afraid that she was secretly bad at everything, and that no one had ever told her.

"Hi, Mary," said Janet, her supervisor. "It's nice of you to finally join us."

Mary looked at her watch. She was fifteen minutes late.

"Hi, how are you doing?" Mary said, avoiding eye contact. "You seemed a little stressed when I came into the co-op last week. Is everything—"

Janet cut her off. "Don't you think you should get to work?"

"Okay," Mary said. She assessed her effort to keep her voice steady, and concluded that it was sufficient. She pulled a partial wheel of Parmesan cheese out of the refrigerator. Someone else had cut it, but forgotten to leave it out to soften it in preparation for her arrival. She assembled her tools: a cutting board with a wire, and special knives that she couldn't remember the names or uses for. The ad for this job said that it required extensive training. Usually that meant Janet waited until Mary had cut and wrapped a lot of cheese, and then told her everything she did wrong.

Janet sighed.

"Hello again," Mary said, attempting to keep her tone friendly but not too friendly. She could never get a read on Janet. When she started, it sometimes felt like Janet had been flirting with her. Mary had been relieved when Janet referred to the existence of a boyfriend. Mary wasn't interested in men, or women, either. She just wanted to be left alone.

"I would show you how to wrap again," Janet said.

Mary paused. "Sure."

"But at a certain point, when are we just going to admit that this isn't working?"

"What's not working?"

"I've shown you how to wrap cheese so many times," Janet said. "We've been getting complaints about your wrapping. This cheese is expensive, and you're wasting money."

"Excuse me," she said and ran upstairs to the bathroom.

Now she was a cliche. She was crying in a bathroom. God. Was she an actual baby? She howled. After a few minutes, she composed herself and went back downstairs to the cheese area.

"I'm sorry for getting upset," she told Janet. "I knew I wasn't a prodigy, but I had no idea you were getting complaints about me. That was never communicated."

Mary sat on a stool and put price tags on the wrapped cheese. She put it in a basket and began to clean up, exquisitely slowly. She just needed to make it to the end of the shift, so she could get credit for working. Then she could figure out a shift that she couldn't screw up. Who gets fired from a job they're not getting paid for?

A pop song played over the PA system, and Mary felt her lip quiver.

"Excuse me," she said, and went back upstairs to the bathroom.

Maybe this isn't so bad, Mary thought. Janet can't penalize me for taking bathroom breaks to cry, can she? Maybe it'll make her feel just a little bad. Who does that? Who tells someone they're the slowest person they've ever taught to do anything? Am I really the slowest? How could I never have known? How could…

There was a knock on the door.

"Just a moment," Mary said. Shit.

She splashed water on her face. She read in a book once about something called "the fire hose test." The idea was that it helped to distinguish girls who were "fake" pretty from girls who were "real" pretty. If you spray a girl with a fire hose, any advantage from makeup is obliterated. The co-op sink wasn't exactly a fire hose, but the effect it created was similar.

She opened the door. There was a line. She went back downstairs. She cleaned as slowly as she could, the clock ticking toward the final moments of her shift. Her face was red and her eyes were red and soon her hands would be red from the cleaning supplies. Maybe if she were lucky, her body would swell up. Then she'd know that her body knew as much as her mind: this world is best avoided. 🧀

ICYMI