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FROM Zyzzyva
The most valuable personality trait for a pizza boy was having a car. Alison had an old, bad car, which was good, according to the other pizza boys: if she had never had a driving job before, then she wouldn’t be aware of the unprecedented trauma that the car would go through, and the practicality of owning a beater.
The pizza store was not clean, but it was white. The pizza boys were Eric, Casey, Malcolm, and Alison. The manager of the pizza boys was Miles, whose face had begun its middle-age spread but who was really no older than twenty-five. Miles orientated her about her responsibilities while Eric and Casey and Malcolm disappeared patternlessly on pizza deliveries and returned to eat slices of pizza and stare into the small, square television nestled into a ceiling corner like a hornet’s nest. It played Mexican wrestling with no sound.
Eric and Casey and Malcolm had a lot of advice for Alison about being a pizza boy. Mostly the advice was about getting robbed, which was an inevitability. They told her not to put the topper on top of the car and to always park directly in front of the customer’s house. They disagreed over keeping a gun in the car. Casey and Malcolm had guns and Eric did not. It was against the rules of the pizza store, Miles the manager had told her specifically. The pizza boys agreed he had mentioned it specifically because it was specifically a very logical idea. They agreed it was best to have a fake wallet with a fake driver’s license and fake credit cards in it. Eric and Casey and Malcolm were younger than Alison, younger than twenty-one, and all had fake IDs for many of the things they liked to do. Casey offered to get Alison a fake ID and Alison accepted.
They talked to her with their faces turned up toward the corner of the room and dipped pizza into their open mouths. Sometimes one would go deliver a pizza and leave his slice with Alison and her Form I-9. The ridges of his bites would be distinct when he left, and when he returned the cheese would have oozed and rounded them out.
“Assume anyone in a sweatshirt is trying to rob you,” Eric said.
“Assume anyone walking toward you purposefully is trying to rob you,” Malcolm said.
Phantoms of hatred, Alison thought. It wasn’t going to work on her.
The fake ID that Casey brought her said she was Georgina, from Georgia.
“This is so fake,” she said. “It’s too fake.”
Actually, it was real and stolen. It didn’t really say that she was Georgina, from Georgia, just that Georgina was. And Georgina really was. Georgina looked a little like Alison, although their heights, weights, ages, and eye colors didn’t match.
“You aren’t trying to trick anyone,” Casey said. “It’s just something to give over when they want something.”
Alison was released into the city with her pizzas. Almost immediately she was made to relinquish the dummy wallet. Casey got her a new fake ID that said she was Constance, from Wyoming.
The work was not interesting, but it changed all the time. Alison was the only pizza boy whose schedule didn’t need to accommodate college or a second job, so she was slotted in anywhere and everywhere the other pizza boys couldn’t or wouldn’t work. On peak nights they all worked. Her hours were different each day of the week, and each week of the month.
She spent a lot of time alone with pizza in her car. Her work was mainly the work of getting to the houses. She had never spent so much time in the car and she had never driven so much at night. Her night vision was either worsening or had always been poor, but the car, the beater, seemed to be coping all right. No need for a map or a plan: her phone spoke directions to her, glowing in her cup holder. The smell of pizza became divorced from the smell of food. It sat zippered into a warm, shiny case like a puffy ski jacket. She sat it behind her in the back seat and looked at it in the rearview mirror every so often to make sure it was secure. She handed it off and her car smelled just the same as if it were still there.
A novel and welcome sensation: Alison was a part of people’s lives without them being a part of hers. It didn’t take long for people to begin calling the pizza store to place an order and finish with, Send the girl. This meant one of the other pizza boys would go if they were available. If they were not and Alison had to go, the customer would say to her, A pizza girl. That’s like something from a porno. The job was only sexual when people standing in the doorways of their homes holding exact change looked at her and said “porno” with their big smiles, and then it was only sexual in the joyless, threatening way of work.
This was not the only type of customer who recognized her. She saw it in the eyes or in the greeting—hi instead of hello—or in a big tip meant to acknowledge and honor their camaraderie. She believed them. It probably was true that she had been to these streets and these houses before. But she was free of recollection.
Again she was robbed. She learned that people would order pizzas to be delivered to empty apartments so that they could rob the pizza boy. She learned that people left the porch light off for reasons mainly sinister, and waited for her out on the porch not out of eagerness to eat. She learned that there was no difference between the fear of a jutting lump in a pocket and the fear of the metal, flashed. She learned that the cancelled credit card in the wallet soothed and sated them. She learned that teenagers were as huge as grown people, which hadn’t seemed true when she thought of the difference between herself then and herself now. Casey got her a new fake ID that said she was Lucinda, from New Mexico.
Alison’s body changed. Her posture at the wheel was nearly fetal. Her weight shifted in the way of the sedentary: downwards. Her belly acquired a bisection across it like a C-section scar from where it folded over on itself. But she wasn’t getting altogether fatter. Her face thinned, and her breasts shrank. All of her bras puckered open off her flesh and pressed out against her shirts like the gaping, hard-shelled mouths of two begging baby birds.
Casey gave her a big stack of new faces. Bulk discount, he said.
Nights when it rained were peak nights. All the pizza boys were deployed at once. There was a sense of pleasant outcastliness in being made to travel more the more other people didn’t want to. She drove out into the county.
Deep in a shitty neighborhood she hit an animal. It was nothing she’d ever done before but she knew immediately what had happened from the heft and shift of the car. She got out and couldn’t see anything in the rain. Your destination is on the right, said her phone from inside the car. Her shoulders became damp in the rain, but she couldn’t find the animal she’d hit. She turned the car around to point the headlights in the other direction and the phone said, Your destination is on the left. She thought: what if she had hit a cat and it was the cat of the person who had ordered the pizza, and she would have to deliver the bad news and the pizza both?
But really it was a groundhog. She found it then. Nobody’s. It looked like it was shivering but it was only the rain pelting its fur all over; it was plenty dead.
The person who had ordered the pizza sent their child to the door with the money. The child was five or six, a son.
“PIZZA,” he said into the house, which looked entirely yellow from out in the dark rain.
“Can I speak to an adult?” Alison asked.
He took the pizza from her and went into the house. Alison waited at the open door. She had seen this view of many houses. This was a small one, so she could see a lot of it from out here. A television. Some water damage crawling down the wall. Beige carpets throughout. A row of bobbleheads on a shelf. No books. An ill-lit hall leading out of sight, which a woman came out of.
It might have been Alison’s glut of fake IDs that suggested to her that this woman was by and large her own type: a white woman with long, brown hair. Neither was she beautiful, but all ugly women were ugly in their own ways. Alison didn’t know how long this woman had been an eater of pizza but it took a toll: whiteheads bloomed in the folds between nostril and cheek like clusters of pearls. She was younger than Alison and, because of the acne, looked even younger than that. You have the skin of a much younger woman, Alison thought to say. The title of this joke was “Pizza Face.”
She didn’t have a pizza body, per se, but she had had a child, unlike Alison, and that showed. She wore the tight, slick ponytail and sweatpants of the shell-shocked night people who came into the pizza store.
For her part, Alison wore her uniform shirt. Clean, as always: for better tips. But at this point very wet.
“I hit an animal outside your house,” she said. “A groundhog, I think.”
The woman cringed. “What was it doing in the rain? Oh, no.”
“It’s dead,” Alison said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”
“Animal control,” the woman said. “I’ll call. Thank you for the pizza.”
“I’m Alison,” Alison said.
Highway hypnosis. All the red taillights oozing down ahead of her: slow, relentless, like lava.
Alison applied and reapplied her makeup in the car throughout her shifts. Pizza boy was a job that required no physical upkeep—except to her car. In fact, with a non-zero amount of harassment, the smarter instinct might have been to embrace plainness. But the sexlessness and the solitude dared her to attempt beauty.
House numbers were never visible enough. Astounding that people could live in such close proximity to each other and remain so hidden. “Addies,” the pizza boys called them when they complained together. “No addy.” They asked each other, How will the ambulance find you in time? Hmm?
Alison stayed in the car when the porch light wasn’t on, and called. “Please turn on your porch light,” she said. She was becoming bolder. When no one answered her on the phone she would get out of the car and move into the back seat. She would unzip the hot bag and take out the box of pizza and open it. She looked at what kind of pizza these people had gotten. She pried off one pepperoni and ate it herself and then fixed her lipstick.
She knew at once when she had returned to the neighborhood of the woman and her son. It was raining again but the groundhog had been cleared away by someone.
“PIZZA,” screamed the boy into his home.
His mother came to the door with the money. Alison gave her five filthy one-dollar bills in change and got all of them back for her tip. “Your son looks just like you,” Alison said.
The woman smiled. “Simon. And I’m Hortense.”
Alison winnowed herself down. It wasn’t hard because she only ate single toppings from people’s pizzas, and that only when they deserved it. The only thing on her that swelled and swelled was her ankles. She didn’t seem to have any at all. Two logs ending in feet. She underwent a fantasy in which she was taking the hot, insulated package to the hospital as fast as she could, so that it could give birth to the pizza. The title of this fantasy was “Delivery.”
She had hoped that ugly women made beautiful sons, and here she was, right after all. The next time she delivered pizza to Hortense and her son, she brought the only offering she could find at the pizza store: an extra plastic pizza saver, a clean one, which she produced from her pocket. “A table for dolls,” she suggested.
Simon didn’t have any dolls, and his action figures never took meals.
Hortense said thank you and kept the pizza saver for herself.
Alison found that Casey had included a man’s driver’s license in his bulk order by mistake. Dennis from Arizona. She could see why: the type, white with long brown hair, was the same. She chose this one for her next dummy wallet and looked forward, almost, to its theft. Carrying it in the breast pocket of her clean uniform, she thought what she had thought often: I would have been more beautiful as a boy, or less ugly.
Of course it was taken from her soon enough. The interloper didn’t even look at it. These IDs had probably come to her, indirectly, from interactions very much like these, and they were going back where they came from, one by one. Next she would be Barbara from Florida.
Hortense invited Alison into her small home. For what else, pizza. She put in the order over the phone at the pizza store and said, Send the girl. Send her I don’t care when. At the end of her shift.
It was pitch-black outside at the end of her shift, which was past eleven. The pizza stayed hot in its swaddle, but Alison checked on it before she went up to the house. She popped one slice of black olive into her mouth and tongued it until it came apart.
Hortense took the pizza from Alison at the door and paid her for it. There was a pile of shoes near the front door so Alison added her shoes to it, making herself at home. Hortense set out paper plates on the kitchen table while Alison touched each bobblehead on the shelf so that they all nodded up at her, frantically and then with fatigue. Simon opened a two-liter bottle of orange soda, which hissed and then overflowed a little onto the beige carpet, and they all ate ravenously. Hortense and Simon chewed their food just the same. Alison didn’t know what she looked like while eating. The pizza tasted wonderful.
When they finished the pizza Simon watched Mexican wrestling on TV. It was in Spanish, so none of them could understand. Alison told Hortense that if she let Simon watch Spanish TV often enough, he might begin to learn Spanish from it, being that he was so young. Hortense said that was what she was hoping for.
When it was almost one in the morning Alison put her shoes back on and said goodbye for now to Simon. But when she stepped outside she saw that her car was gone.
“Oh, no,” said Hortense.
“The other pizza boys warned me not to put the topper on top of the car,” Alison said. “Shit.”
Alison called the police and they sent over a young officer to take a statement. She showed him the only driver’s license she had, which said she was Barbara from Florida. She told him the registration had been in the car, which was true, and he told her it was more secure to keep it in her wallet in case of a theft like this. He took down the fake name on her fake ID and told her she should get a license in their state whenever she could. He told her it was not likely they would recover her vehicle.
Then Alison called the pizza store and explained what had happened. Miles was confused as to why the topper had been on top of the car after she was clocked out for the night anyway. He didn’t feel he bore any responsibility, which Alison was willing to concede. He said he could send one of the pizza boys to give her a ride, but she declined.
What was the actionable difference between a personality trait and a coping mechanism? Without a car, Alison was no longer capable of being a pizza boy. Hortense said she could stay over for the night and she accepted.
There were no extra places to sleep in Hortense’s small house, so Hortense had Simon sleep in her bed and offered Simon’s room to Alison. “If you need anything, we’re across the hall,” Hortense said, and then she and her son went to sleep.
It was not Alison’s fault what she dreamed that night. It was the pizza. She never ate pizza and she never ate so close to bedtime. Hortense’s mouth with its outline of Braille bumps. If she were a slice of pizza she could have decoded this message on her way into the pit: now I will die. Alison got herself all twisted up in the thick pilly sheets enduring this fantasy. If Hortense were to take off her clean uniform shirt. Lay her hands on Alison in the tiny twin bed. Slide her fingers in and draw out something molten and gold.