Bakery Girl

an excerpt from BALL, by Tara Ison

(SmartSmut, Nerve.com - 2/14/2007)

There are two kinds of women here: the old ones, wrinkled and chipper, with hairpinned buns or permed wisps, knobbed knuckles and grandmother names like Ruby, Esther, or Bess, who work the morning shifts and slice and bag marbled ryes with the efficiency of nuns. And then there are the girls, in their mid-to-late teens, who come in after school, if they go to school, to relieve the old ones. The girls work till closing at 9 pm, and all day Saturdays and Sundays. The smell of their fruity lip gloss and gum competes with the cherry-topped cheesecakes and yeast, and they cinch their bib aprons tight around their waists, tug them low over their tank tops, lean far over the counters toward the rare male customer. The old ones have been working here fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and greet regulars by name, know their preferences in rugalah; the girls are just passing through, they tell themselves, just picking up the minimum-wage paycheck on their way to something better, something else.

The new girl is watching the other girls. She is the youngest one here. Her mother, purchasing Sunday morning bagels (two raisin, two egg), had offered her up to the boss, a 50-something aging rocker called Elliott, son of the shop’s original owner, an octogenarian for whom the bakery was named. Elliott appraised the girl, took in the pearly pink nail polish, the good posture, the evidence of pricey orthodontia in the awkward smile. It wasn’t quite legal to hire her. But he likes the younger girls, they work hard. And the customers would like this one, too, her baby fat and still-clear skin. The older girls, well, they start to look a little tough after a few years.

And all the sweet things you can eat, Elliott had told the girl, grinning, and she’d smiled back.

There are also two kinds of men, here, besides Elliott. The Latino guys who load dough into kneading machines and bake sheet after sheet of cakes, and the descendents of the original owner, a flock of male cousins in their late teens and early twenties who carry trays of cookies and loaves back and forth. They all look like younger variations of Elliott. All of them are musicians. During their breaks they sit on the hoods of their cars in the parking lot and play air guitar. The hottest of them, an older girl advises the new girl on her first day, is Jamie, Elliott’s son. He actually plays in a band. He's really hot. Maybe she can come with all of them to see him play sometime. We’ll sneak you in to the club.

The new girl nods, happy. These girls are much cooler than her friends at school. She’s never had access to girls like this, worldly and mature. She is just barely filling out her A cups, so she tries to keep her shoulders back, her chest muscles outthrust. She has had nine periods in her life. It still thrills her, the surprise warm curl of blood pushing through to her underpants, the buying of junior tampons, the womanly tug of a cramp. When she masturbates, reading at night from her mother’s nightstand books, there’s more wet and a sharper smell now, her insides get to a harder clutch and peak. And now she has her first job. All the sweet things she can eat. Friends who go to clubs. Girls who know about sneaking you in, who use gloss, not balm, who laugh like women. Things will start to happen now. She’s not quite fourteen....