673: Ariane spun . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 11 concludes
Ariane spun around and strode into the Sunrise Cove, head up, a new confidence about her, as if she were the older sister in the picture, not the ingenue.
“Hey, Tootsie,” said Mr. Murray, the man who hired her.
Now where the hell did he hear that? she asked herself. And what else has he heard?
“Everybody’s here,” he said. “Great.” He had a cigar stuck in his mouth. Ariane looked at it disapprovingly. “This is Renée,” he said. “She’ll be your boss. Renée. Tootsie.”
“It’s Ariane,” said Ariane, in a voice she had practiced using all week, a soft voice, very gentle, as if she had too delicate a throat to make an effort to make herself heard. She was dismayed to find that Renée was a brassy-looking woman. There were rhinestones in the frames of her glasses, and her red hair was obviously dyed. She seemed to belong at a less glamorous resort hotel.
“Hi, Ariane,” said Renée. “You hear that, you goon?” she said, elbowing Mr. Murray. “It’s Ariane. Don’t call her Tootsie.” She leaned into his ear and said, as if she were a cigar-smoking pal, as crude as he: “She don’t like it.” To Ariane, she said, “Come on, I’ll show you around and introduce you to the other waitresses.”
“Oh,” said Ariane. “Waitresses?”
Renée gave her a questioning look. Ariane tried to hide the disappointment she felt, to demonstrate how unflappable she was.
“I—I had hoped,” she said, “that I might—”
“Might what?” said Renée. “You got to go to the—”
“No. No. I just—did you already choose someone for hostess?”
“Hostess? Yeah, I chose someone.”
“Oh.”
“Me.”
“Oh! I see. I didn’t—I thought—”
“That’s okay, that’s okay,” said Renée. She took Ariane’s arm and led her away. “There’s hope. Don’t get all mopey and forlorn. I’m just establishing a beachhead here, you know. The goon and me and the other two guys, we’re the marines. We’ll get the place set up and running, and then we’ll go invade someplace else. Set up the next one. That’s what we do. There’s gonna be places like this coast to coast.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So, you got a chance. When we go, some lucky girl becomes hostess. That lucky girl could be you. Watch what I do and you do likewise. Get me?”
“Yes. Yes, I get you. I’ll be watching.”
“Well, remember that I’ll be watching, too.”
“You’ll be watching? Oh, watching me. Of course. I understand.”
Renée winked at her and walked off, and Ariane observed the way she walked, the way she turned a critical eye on things as she passed, and the way she gave an order or made a comment or offered a compliment to the employees as she went by, so that everyone heard a word from her and was reminded that she was being observed. Ariane began emulating her at once. She followed in her footsteps, a few paces behind her, and made a comment or simply said hello, or “Nice to see you here,” and many of the other Babbington girls returned home that night with the astonishing news that Tootsie Koochikov seemed to be a very important person at the new resort, something like assistant manager.
[to be continued]
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