A Spot for Pippi

There was a time in my life when I thought running a tea shop would be grand. It would be a dream place with big comfy seats and maybe a story hour for children, puppet shows, and of course tea and little cakes. I thought it would be helpful to actually work in a tea shop before going ahead with my plans and at the time, I was living in the Rocky Mountains.

My long exhausting year living at a private school and teaching “at risk” high school students was coming to a close. It was time for me to move on and try something new. I can only deal with a strong black kid holding me down and trying to choke me once this lifetime (“I was only playing,” he said when I panicked and started to cry), but that is a story for a different time. The point is I was looking at different horizons. Summer was approaching and I decided to quit the high school and try out a tea shop, see if that fit me better. My parents lived nearby the school and I was hoping to spend the summer up in the mountains with them. So, I needed a summer job lest my mother incessantly remind me that she “isn’t going to keep me busy.”

The little town had basically two tea shops. One of them was near my parent’s home. On no special day in particular, I decided to press my luck and visit one of the tea shops. The place was called “Pippi’s” and it was a little peach painted house-like café. I pulled into the small parking lot and went inside. The café was quiet at this time of day and Chlorox clean. An older woman with two long orange braids and denim overalls stood behind a glass counter filled with gourmet baked goods. Was this Pippi?

“Hello,” I looked at her golden croissants, shiny berry tarts and beyond her on a glass shelf little raspberry and brown colored packets of hot chocolate.

“May I help you?,” she stared at me quite coldly. She had an accent I couldn’t quite place. Definitely not born in the USA. I explained to her that I was interested in a summer job and wanted to know if she needed help.

“Do you have a minute to talk now?,” she asked while wiping her hands on her pants.

“Sure,” I said feeling like this was easier than expected.

“Let’s sit down,“ she stepped out and gestured to a little square table.

“So, where are you from?,” she asked me.

I had just finished teaching at-risk youth and the year prior had been teaching in Israel. When I told her this, she seemed to light up. “Israel?”, she beamed, “I lived there a long time ago. A long time ago.”

“Wow! Great!,” I didn’t press for too much information but she had that accent and I wanted to know where she was from. “Where are you from originally?,” I asked.

“I’m from Belgium.”

“Oh, so do you speak French or Flemish?,” I asked giving her a slow and deliberate sideways glance after my question had been asked, like that ugly red haired man from the Miami CSI show, just for effect (no I didn't do this but I did want to crack the accent mystery!)

“I used to speak all of those languages,” she said, “I don’t speak any of them now.”

This seemed strange to me and I remember vaguely feeling that maybe, just maybe, she had survived the Nazis. After all, she had lived in Israel, but I was definitely not going to ask her that.

“I work my girls very hard,” she said.

I nodded my head.

“We do everything here. We make the all the drinks, do the cleaning, wait tables, and we do the dishes. My girls and I do everything.”

“Okay,” I said. A quick vision of Ozzy Osborne entered my mind. Let me explain. Back in high school, I was a dish washer at Denny’s. I spent frantic hours in a dark little sink area spraying dishes (and occasionally my face and clothes) and loading them into the dishwasher at night. No matter how fast I would go, how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep up with the dishes. They just kept coming and coming. It was like being punished in hell. I left every night looking as if I had just been released from an insane asylum, sopping clothes, mascara rings under my eyes, my fingers all shriveled, hence my Ozzy image. But, I had survived. And that is why I said, “Okay,” to Pippi.

I started a week after our interview. Another girl was starting the same day, Ashley, and she had espresso machine experience. Both of us were under the scrutiny of Pippi. One of us was always doing something wrong. Pippi ran a tight ship. She could’ve been a drill sergeant.

“Did you charge that man for his coffee cup lid?,” she snarled while standing behind me. “You need to charge for lids or we’re going to lose money. Everything has to be accounted for. Lids are ten cents, cups are fifteen cents, butter is ten cents…” she would go on like this. She repeated all of this at least three times a day. I displayed great self-control by not blurting, “Okay! God! Enough!,” and wished I could roll my eyes, but I imagined that even if her back had been turned towards me, she would know. Everything had to be done with precision and she was there to see to that.

She showed us how to clean her bathroom. We had to use dry paper towels to shine the chrome on the sink faucet and handles. There could be no smudges, no finger prints.

One sunny day, I was wiping down tables and she came over to me in a huff and grabbed the rag out of my hand. “You aren’t doing it right,” she said dipping the rag into the bucket of soapy water. “You need to wring it out like this,” she showed me the right way, “or it will leave streaks on the table when it dries.” She was on our backs the entire day. She wouldn’t let up.

Once, Ashley said under her breath to me, “Pippi is being a bitch today.” Pippi stormed out from the kitchen, lord knows how she overheard that one, and with foam practically frothing at her lips hissed, “What did you say?” I think Ashley shrunk to dwarf size that day.

On quiet afternoons, sometimes I’d find myself alone with Pippi. On one particular day, I was grinding coffee and filling little bags that she sold for a small fortune. Whenever it was quiet, we would have some major task to perform. She was filling ice trays with espresso shots for her infamous ice coffee (if you use ice cubes, the coffee gets watered down, hence espresso ice cubes with cold espresso poured on top. Try it, you’ll have Parkinson’s for days). As I was saying, we were alone and we began chatting.

“Do you have family out here?,” she asked me.

I told her my parents lived here. Then I asked her, “What about you? Do you still have family in Belgium?”

“Yes. I have a sister who lives there. But, I didn’t know about her until ten years ago.”

A sister in Belgium she didn’t know about? How could this be? “What do you mean?,” I kept grinding those beans and filling those bags.

“We were separated when we were little.”

After this statement, I knew something critical had happened in her life. I didn’t say anything; I just waited to see how much she would share.

“My sister is deaf and after they took my parents, they took me and my sister to an orphanage for deaf children. I learned how to sign and when they realized I wasn’t deaf, an American family adopted me.”

“You mean during the war? So, they took your parents? Your parents were taken to the concentration camps?”

“Yes. My entire family was killed.”

Feeling overwhelmed, my eyes filled with tears. I brushed them away.

“What’s wrong,” she asked walking towards me, “did you get some coffee grinds in your eye?”

“No,” I said and turned to look at her, “I just didn’t know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. It was a long time ago,” she waved it off.

“So what happened with your sister?”

“Well, ten years ago, she found me. I had forgotten I had a sister. I must’ve blocked it out or something, but she remembered. Now, I see her every year.”

“Wow,” I said, “that is so neat.”

“What about your family,” she asked me, “are they Jewish?”

“Yes, but they were all here in the US before the war,” I said.

”Yeah, I figured you were Jewish. So you must be familiar with having a Jewish mother?,” She laughed though it wasn’t clear if she was also referring to herself as being a Jewish mother. Her behavior was a far cry from what I consider a Jewish mother though she did have the nagging down. But, cliché and distasteful to say, she was much more like a Nazi.

A couple days later, our blessed part of the Rocky Mountain National Park was going to have the pleasure of a cyclist race passing through. Ashley and I were at Pippi’s very early. I had opened the shop and Pippi had not yet come in. A pack of tightly, brightly clad cyclists came into the shop and clicked across our floor. Some of them ordered “Double skinny lattes” and others joined the ever growing queue for the bathroom. Within minutes, a foul odor began to consume our coffee haven.

“Oh, my god!” Ashley flared her nostrils.

“What the hell?,” I inhaled.

“They’re taking dumps in our bathroom!,” Ashley said horrified.

“Oh, no! No! This is awful.”

"Yes! That's what they do," she whispered, "They've done it before. The cyclists always do this!"

Just then, Pippi came in, took a look around the place and said, “Our bathroom is for customers only.”

“Hurry,“ she said to us, “get a sign up, make a sign. This is not a public bathroom!”

So we made a sign and put it on the door. As each cyclist left, feeling much lighter, they would wave and smile.

“Go clean the bathroom once it’s empty,” she said to me. I don’t know how I made it through that task without puking. However, I was conditioned that day to equate “brightly dressed cyclist” with “huge smelly dump.” And so, now whenever I see a pack of cyclists whiz by, I automatically dry heave.

If my husband happens to be with me, I can’t help but say (after I finish feigning someone who just smelled a rotten corpse) “Oh, cyclists! They take the biggest dumps. When I worked at ---“

And he cuts me off and says, “Pippi’s! Yes! I know! You tell me all the time! Get over it!”

This reminds me of one more story Pippi told me. She said when she first moved in with her adoptive family, she would hide food in the bottom drawer of her dresser. When no one was looking, she would take the leftovers off her plate, hide them in her napkin and stash them away. One day, a terrible smell was coming from her room. Her parents wanted to know what it was so they began searching her room and as they opened her drawers, they found her food which had rotted, in the bottom drawer. Doesn’t this make your heart weep? A child hiding her food because she has lived so long with an empty stomach, without knowing when she will eat again, so she instinctively stocks up, a child, this just breaks my heart.

Well, Pippi and I kept in touch for a couple years afterward. I would pop in her shop when visiting my folks (she always charged me for a coffee by the way) and once I even received a Happy Hannukah card from her. I lost touch with her and even though working for her was living hell, I still hold a spot in my heart for Pippi. And needless to say, I’m sure you can gather that working in a tea shop was not my thing either.