Secret

Noodle Delight was a humble restaurant – a decade in business, 3.7 on Google Maps, and not a single day when all the tables were full. It was owned by Mr and Mrs Tsai, an odd couple who seemed only to have each other.

Although I worked under them for six years as their sole employee, they never told me how they met. I saw them every day so these sorts of questions, the big ones, were hard to ask. I imagined that they had eloped after some kind of whirlwind romance, forcing them out of China and into a middling Toronto suburb, friendless.

There was also the question of why they had no children. The answer to this, Mrs Tsai volunteered one day in a spat with her husband – “Get back to the kitchen, you impotent donkey!” I remember looking up from the dirty dishes, thinking, Ah, so that’s how it is.

The restaurant could seat three families and four couples. A white curtain divided the kitchen from the dining area. Mr and Mrs Tsai would swap duties on a whim; there was no set schedule to who would be cooking and who would be serving. Mr Tsai made the better noodles, Mrs Tsai made the better fried rice. As for me, I cleaned the toilet, tossed the trash, and washed the dishes.

There’s nothing to say about dirty dishes or taking out the trash. Nothing to say about cleaning the toilet either, except for maybe one incident where a customer made a particularly horrible mess. I won’t get into the detritus of it, but after peeking under the toilet lid, I knew the mission was above my pay grade. I called out for Mr Tsai to help me out and he promptly deferred it to Mrs Tsai. After a minute of feeble protest, she came into the bathroom with a plastic bottle and a bottle of cleaning fluid.

“I’m the only one who knows how to deal with the toilet,” she sighed. She rolled up her sleeves and lowered the bottle in the toilet bowl. I looked away, and when I looked back the toilet was unclogged. “A technique I learned from my Russian friend.”

As she crouched over the bowl, watching the blue cleaning fluid drain down, Mrs Tsai expressed her sympathies. “Poor thing. I feel terrible about all the junk I drop in its mouth.” – “Sorry,” she said to the toilet.

“You talk to the toilet?”

“Sure! But no matter what I do, it hisses at me – ssssssssssss – like an angry snake,” she said with a fake shudder. The toilet, as if on cue, started hissing – “See?”

She furrowed her brows. “I told Gary about it and he said, ‘Feed it poop or feed it red snapper, it’ll hiss at you anyways.’ He looked real smug. He thinks he’s so wise. I told him, ‘Write that in your book of wisdom. I’ll publish it when you’re dead.’ He said, ‘No way, you’ll reap all the royalties.’”

“I’d read his book,” I laughed.

“I would too,” she said thoughtfully, “but he’s too lazy to write anything down. He says things and forgets them. It’s too bad.”

So the toilet hissed, the coffee machine purred, and the soap dispenser groaned – especially when the sensor malfunctioned and left a sad dribble of soap in the sink. I started seeing the world through Mrs Tsai’s eyes; it was my job to tame these whining machines.

I was never given the responsibility of cooking or serving the food, but anything outside of that was fair game. After the dinner rush, it would be up to me and Mr Tsai to clean the kitchen. He rarely started conversations, but was happy when spoken to. Without Mrs Tsai, the kitchen felt rather quiet. When we finished, the three of us would eat a late dinner together before heading home.

“I do at least 60% of the work in this household,” Mrs Tsai declared.

“That’s funny because I do at least 70%,” Mr Tsai said.

“I must be doing negative 30%,” I said.

“Negative thirty!” Mr Tsai laughed, looking exactly like the Fat Buddha.

Off hours, I was busy applying to jobs and daydreaming about traveling abroad. There’s nothing to say here, except that I took six years to find a job, and in that time I stopped dreaming about far-away things.

“A vacation costs five-thousand dollars. A tray of chicken thighs costs five dollars and feeds a whole family. Do the math: A vacation costs one thousand families.” – Mrs Tsai would’ve said something like that. She must’ve deboned millions of chicken thighs in her life. When it was her kitchen day, she’d hunch over the cutting board and finish each thigh in two clean motions of the knife. She wouldn’t stop until a whole plastic basin was full.

“A vacation costs one thousand families?” I’d ask. “That sounds deadly.”

And Mr Tsai might say, “Vacations are for dead souls, the ceaselessly bored. Mahjong is enough for me.”

These little puppet versions of them had settled in my head, chattering outside of work hours. It was a game of “he would say this” or “she would say that”. I felt a kind of happy buzz on my walks home, just from recounting the various happenings of the day like a puppet show.

On Mrs Tsai’s kitchen days, she’d check in with my life progress like a doting mother: “Any interviews? When are you getting a girlfriend?”

“No interviews,” I’d say. “No girlfriend.”

“I asked ‘when’ girlfriend,” she’d say.

“Well, first I’ve got to find a job and then find some hobbies, become a person of my own, and attend some parties and charm some–”

“Okay, great,” she’d say. “That’s a great plan.”

“Gary met a new lady at the swimming pool,” she told me one day.

I nearly dropped my dish.

“Her name is Amy, and they met at the community center pool. They swim together every Sunday. Maybe you should go swimming too. You could keep an eye on them for me. If I could swim I’d do it myself, but I can’t.”

Was she suggesting I learn from his example – to meet women at the pool? “You’re joking,” I said.

“No, he really does have a swimming friend,” she laughed. I wanted to see her face, but she was turned away, stirring a pot. “It’s strange right? He’s as good as a stone at holding a conversation, but still, things happen, people meet.”

I pictured Mr Tsai taking off his shirt by the poolside, transforming into a different beast. “I didn’t think he’d be unfaithful,” I said weakly.

She turned to me in astonishment, and on seeing my serious face, laughed, “Who said he was?” – she pointed a finger – “Dirty imagination!”

I turned quite red and apologized.

“What I meant is, this kind of stuff happens to everyone,” she said, her laugh fading. “You can be a stone and you’ll still find people.” She was deep in thought, staring at the contents of the pot.

“Knowing you is enough,” I said.

She tilted her head. “Pardon?”

My walk home that night was anxiety-ridden. Had I spoken too softly? Was I willfully ignored? I dreamt that night of Mrs Tsai being deaf to me as we worked at opposite ends of the kitchen, a sponge in my hand and a ladle in hers.

For the last year or so of my employment, I had some kind of special feeling towards Mrs Tsai. A misshapen fondness, a premature kind of love. It was like love in the way she had absolute control over my moods. Lying in bed, I alternately despaired over awkward moments and smiled dumbly at the ones where I’d made her smile. This fondness, which should’ve been a happy thing, made me feel perverse and adolescent, as though I were a kid in elementary school with unspeakable feelings for his teacher.

I view them now as harmless thoughts, something more chemical than spiritual. I never acted on them. In a kind of anticlimax, my job search simply ended one day – I had landed an assistant role at a marketing firm – and it was clearer than ever that there would be no chance of romance.

On Christmas Eve, the Tsai’s invited me to their flat to commemorate my leave. This was my first time seeing the single-bedroom apartment they shared: the polka dot curtains, the stacks of pink, green, and blue washbasins, the dining table half covered in papers. Mrs Tsai brought out a box of liquor-filled chocolates and offered me one. From the scant selection that remained, I picked out the last rabbit-shaped one.

“The rabbit represents ‘secret’,” she smiled mischievously.

“Because of its shyness?”

“Because of the moon.”

Mr Tsai cleared the table and set up a game of 3-player Mahjong. They taught me the rules, and we played and drank and I felt like I was sixty years old. I kept losing games, racking up a streak so bad that Mr Tsai exclaimed, “Truly a negative thirty percent performance!”

For a moment I was breathless, thinking of how many years it had been since I had made that joke. And then I was elated that he had remembered it. That perhaps I had a place in his mind’s theatre like he did in mine; and that the same was true for Mrs Tsai; that we could hear each other’s voice even when we weren’t around.

As I was about to leave, they gave me a jade pendant. It meant nothing to me, except for what it meant to them. They’re as busy and hardworking as they’ve always been and I rarely see them, but I think about them often.