Fat Woman and Mascara Queen
September 6, 2024
Visits to coffee shops are often sources of interesting chatter among the staff and customers. Such as a recent encounter at, like, Balzac’s in NOTL.
Walking in, I noticed three new employees behind the counter.
One had black and dark red hair, rings in her ears and nose, faux eyelashes, thick, dark lipstick, tattoos on her arms and enough mascara to dam the mighty Niagara River. Think Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Except in this case, it’s Elvira: Mistress of Mascara. She looked awful. I couldn’t imagine showing up for an interview dressed like that and seriously expecting to get the job. Then again, good help is hard to find these days. But I digress. The real chatty one, however, was her fat colleague. She wasn’t battling a weight problem or just packing a few extra pounds. She was F-A-T, fat, fat, fat. Eating for six. The third member of the crew was a young woman from India named Lay Zee who had the energy level of a slug. About all she did during my time there was to carry a bucket of dirty dishes back to the counter. From the way she moped through the seven-step walk, you’d think the tray weighed a ton.
After paying for my order, Fat Woman noted that there was a real run on cold drinks today. An older couple came soon after and also had cold beverages of some sort, each adding a croissant to their order, which came to over $17. Without even tasting his beverage, the guy walked over to where they kept the faux sugar, ripped open a package and poured it right in. He obviously has a sweet tooth.
Next to me was a register blowing cold air. So they did have air conditioning. Yet the back door was propped wide open. As my father would say, “Are they trying to air condition all of Niagara-on-the-Lake?” The wide-open door gave me a good view of a guy sitting outside who looked like the younger brother of Justin Trudeau. It made me want to vomit.
Another older couple walked in. One wanted a coffee, so Fat Woman asked, “Do you want light, medium or, like, dark?” He eschewed the, like, dark and took medium.
After getting the guy’s coffee, Fat Woman turned to Mascara Queen and told her that she’s going to be spending time with her sister.
“Why?” asked Mascara Queen.
“I like the drama,” Fat Woman replied. “She’s very Karen-y. She’s very judgmental. I mean this in the nicest possible way. She’s very invasive. She and her husband are constantly fighting, but they’ve been better lately. She’s a me-me-me type of person. She wants all the attention. She’s very entitled. She expects everyone to clean the house for her. She also expects us to take care of her cat. We want to have, like, productive conversations.”
She moved on and talked about herself. “My knee is giving me problems,” she said. “It’s, like, locking up. It gives me problems when I’m going up stairs.” Apparently it hadn’t occurred to her that dumping a few pounds might help take the strain off her knees. Or dumping a few hundred. Which explains why she was so bummed out over dropping a butter tart recently. It’s plainly obvious from the size of her that few butter tarts miss her mouth. So her reaction to the lemon tarts and date squares they’re getting came as no surprise. “That makes me so happy,” she said.
But she wasn’t happy about having to start at 6:30. “Getting up early is so, like, hard,” she said. She went on to say that she doesn’t have much money and on top of that, she says she has to, like, send money to her friend. Yet she was debating over whether or not to buy some, like, strawberry syrup for the cafe. “Let people use it,” she said. And as I was leaving, she was toying with another potential expense. “I need to buy some makeup,” she said. “I haven’t, like, worn makeup in such a long time.”
For some reason, the expression “lipstick on a pig” came to mind.
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