The following is part of a serialized story, Everyone Thinks I Dream of Chocolate. You can find the first chapter here.
“You can’t let the marshmallow tip like that. The chocolate is going to set with all those fucked up marks.”
That was Dick. Especially in my early days at the shop, he was quick to point out all the things that I did wrong. It came from being a mechanic, I guess. With cars, if you fuck up, you might end up killing someone. With chocolate, that mortality is a slower burn in the form of diabetes. Even still, it never killed his attention to detail.
“And come on,” he added. “You’ve been working on it for 20 minutes already. I could have jacked off AND taken a shit in that time.”
He waddled back to the office. I took off my gloves and massaged my hands. The cramps were similar to when I wrote notes for class. I don’t know if it is the way I hold my pens and forks. I remember as a kid, my teacher’s told my my handwriting was too bold.
I check the clock. It’s been at least a minute. I look at my marshmallows and see my first one has already started to set. The sides are a shiny, matte brown. There is a light coloring from the milk, giving it a mocha-tan color. If I don’t stick it in the fridge now, that beautiful matte finish is going to be covered in a dirty, chalky bloom.
I brought the tray over to fridge and stuck it in there. As I came back out to the front, I checked across the way to the Chocolate Shop for customers. We were at the Grilled Cheese Shop, working on the stainless steel tables in the open, deli-like space. The kitchen here acted as both a sandwich grill and chocolate factory.
Kai checked,too. Confirming it was empty, she looked over at me. A mom of 4 kids, she had a perpetual blank stare, as if the world had done enough to annoy her and this face was all that was left to defend her. In my first week of work, she barely said anything to me unless I asked a question about work. Other than that, she said a total of three different phrases:
- Imma take lunch.
- Imma go to the bathroom.
- Imma go on my smoke break.
“Imma take lunch,” she said, then took off her apron. As she was passing me to get through the little wooden gate, she looked over at my chocolate bowl.
“Is that the chocolate you dipped the marshmallows in?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought he wanted those in dark, not milk.”
She was right. Dick had explicitly said that.
“Fuck,” I said.
She shrugged. “You didn’t even make that many to begin with. Just stick the ones you made on the rack and make the dark ones.”
I nodded.
“I’ll be back in half an hour.”
I went over to the mini fridge and checked on the milk marshmallows. Still needed a couple of minutes. I went into the kitchen, got a pitcher of dark chocolate that had set into one giant, pitcher shaped hunk of chocolate. I heated it up in the microwave, returning it into its primordial, magma-like form. I brought it to my work table and started dipping.
About 15 minutes later, I had finished the tray of about 15 marshmallows when Dick came out of his office. He stopped in front of me as I was on my way to the mini-fridge, his gaze scanning up and down the tray.
“You’re taking too long. See, some of these are already set.”
“Sorry.”
“And how come you have so few?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should have like 30 on a tray.”
“They keep tipping over and making a mess.”
He threw his hands up in the air and headed back to his office, stopping in front of the mini-fridge. He looked through the glass and opened the door with a frustrated jerk. He yanked out a tray of the milk marshmallows. My milk chocolate marshmallows, the ones I had forgotten about.
“Damn it, Mouse!” he said.
“I’m sorry. I…”
“You can’t forget stuff like this! Now we have to hit them with the heat gun. For fuck sakes, if that doesn’t fix these, then their useless we can’t sell them.”
He tossed the tray onto a table. He was whispering to himself in quick, sharp curses as he went out the back door, surely for a cigarette.
The next day, I was alone with Jimmy for the morning. A big guy with dirty blonde hair and beard. He always seemed to come in with a black polo and some device in his ear. It was skin toned and wrapped around the cartilage. With how many times he would ask me ‘what’, I assumed that he was using a hearing aid.
He told me to work on dipping peanut butter cookies in chocolate. I had done this already during my first week and it was simple enough. The only tricky part was remembering to use the glass pitcher meant for specifically for peanut butter products (it was one of our safety measures so that we didn’t accidently kill anyone with an allergy).
Proud at myself for saving the potential life (or wallet; EpiPens aren’t cheap) of a customer, I went to work. For a while, I allowed myself to get into a rhythm. The shape of the cookies were oval, making them easy to balance on my fork. Dunk, lift, tap, and set on the wax paper. Easy.
I was halfway done with dipping the set when Jimmy came back from the back and looked at my work.
“You know you only dip half the cookie, right?”
I froze. My memory of last week hit me, like a usb dongle snapping into the port, the ping quickly blaring through the speakers. In this flashback, I was dipping the cookie with gloved fingers, only dipping halfway, wiping the excess off the edge of the pitcher bowl, then setting it on the tray. There wasn’t even a fork involved.
Jimmy was right. I had fucked up. To be fair, this one the only item dipped this way. But still, my muscle memory had betrayed me and I had just wasted half the product.
“Can we still sell them?”
Jimmy put up his hands, lifting his shoulders and the edges of his mouth in a shrug.
“Dick and Lou are sticklers for consistency.”
Just then, Dick walked in through the Mill’s main entrance. He greeted us as he walked through the gates of the counter. As he took off his jacket he looked over my work.
“You know, you’re only supposed to dip half of those.”
“I heard.”
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8. Marshmallows
Danger Wonka 