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for the evening. Gina got in two hours later and made the desserts. Although they had many things in common—both had grown up with big Sunday lunches with their Italian grandparents, for instance—they couldn’t have been more different.
    Elisa was thin and sporty. On her days off, she trained for marathons and sometimes ran to work in the dawn, about six miles. (“There’s no point in arriving clean and fresh, is there?”) Her hair was graying, and she had a narrow, high-cheekboned face. Gina didn’t exercise. She had thick black hair, and was distinctly rounder, as you’d expect her to be, tasting syrups, chocolates, and creamy batters all day. She was the only person with a cell phone—in the kitchen, private calls were forbidden—partly because she looked after her own ingredients and did her own ordering, but also because she didn’t want to cross the kitchen to use the phone located on a wall where Elisa works. (The issue wasn’t the distance but the company she’d have to keep when she got there.) Besides, Gina was a talker and couldn’t be without a phone.
    Elisa wasn’t chatty. Mornings would pass without her saying a word. Everything—her manner, the efficiency of her movements, her face, with its firm, no-nonsense look—said purposefulness. She was capable of sulkiness (“When she’s in one of her moods, the whole kitchen knows about it,” Gina complained), but you never learned why: you didn’t know much about Elisa’s private life. You knew too much about Gina’s. You knew when, last year, she’d had a date, and what had happened, and what his name was, and then she’d wonder aloud if she’d ever date again.
    “Don’t you have a flight to catch?” Gina asked me. She knew this from the morning’s chitchatty exchanges. “You should leave. I mean,
really,
the way we treat our externs: it’s not as if you’re getting paid.”
    I nodded sympathetically, wanting to make nice, a little confused, because I didn’t yet understand the extern concept. (Externs answer to Elisa, I now understand, and the real issue for Gina was her belief that Elisa was a dour, unfriendly slave driver. Or maybe Gina was jealous that she didn’t have any slaves of her own.)
    Gina continued to stare at me. I stood dumbly with my tray of morels.
    “Really, you need to go.
Now.
”
    She shrugged and walked out. Andy, satisfied by his branzino count, followed her. It was just me and Elisa.
    “You do
not
answer to that woman,” Elisa said in a low, angry voice. She was still on the floor; I was still holding my tray of morels. “Do you understand me? You leave when I say you can leave. I am your boss. I tell you when you can go. Have I made myself clear?”
    I stuttered pathetically. It was four o’clock—when the prep kitchen is normally finished—but I could see there was still a lot to do.
    I returned to the kitchen, bearing my tray of morels, and thought about what had taken place. The outburst had surprised me, although it shouldn’t have: I was familiar with what I regarded as the shoulder-rubbing edginess of the kitchen. I’d seen it between Elisa and Memo Trevino. Memo was one of the two sous-chefs—a big man with a disproportionately big head of wiry black hair, and, at twenty-eight, emphatically in possession of an authority of someone many years older. If Memo accidentally knocked you, the blow came from the torso, not because his belly was so big but because he always led with the groin. More than once a picture popped in my head—no idea from where—of Memo with a spear and headdress. His was the swagger of a tribal chief.
    I’d been in the prep kitchen three weeks when Memo took me aside, wanting to know what I thought of Elisa’s cooking. I was so unprepared for anyone’s soliciting my opinion I didn’t know what he was talking about.
    “It’s not exactly perfect, is it?”
    “What’s not perfect?” I asked.
    “The food.”
    I didn’t understand.
    “Ever notice how much food