Fight or Flight

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

“Just keep pouring your milk!” the girl instructed me. This would be a perfectly acceptable thing for someone to tell you if you were in a cooking class, maybe, and you were learning to make a delicious flan. (Mmmm, flan!) But the girl was speaking to me at the counter of the Standard’s adooorable retro sunshine-hued diner, where she had just interrupted me receiving my coffee, because she simply could not wait her turn to berate the help. And she was speaking to me acidly.

It had started like this: As I was getting my order from the helpful Latino fellow who was very nice when I told him I’d need to buy my $3 cup of coffee with a credit card, the young lady in question stood at my elbow and said, fairly mildly, as she proffered her own cute jug, “Could I have one without a hair in it?” The man of course was embarrassed and apologetic, but not apologetic enough, because the young lady then switched her tone to one of uptight fake mirth, which I suppose is how her own mother regularly addressed the Consuelas and Diegos, and with a constricted laugh, said, “You’re really doing great this morning. First the silverware, now this!” Since she was at my elbow, I glanced her way over my shoulder, perhaps with an eyebrow raised, perhaps not. (I was not looking in a mirror, sadly, since looking in a mirror is just about my favorite thing!)

Vermeer: The Milkmaid

And that’s when she said it to me, her elder: “Just keep pouring your milk.”

Well, now I was delighted! Because while Miss Manners, who you wouldn’t know is my absolute hero but she is, does not condone the instruction of strangers even if they are being rude to others in your presence, she does condone a tone of sadness or an affronted “I beg your pardon!” that makes the other person understand that they are an asshole. And so I was able to say, in a mild/bemused tone, with feigned surprise and with perfect rectitude, “Are you telling me what to do now, in addition to the person who works here?” Well, did that shut her up and send her skulking back to her hairy breakfast partner? IT DID AND I WIN!

I have been rude to service people in my life—not often, of course, I’m not an entitled monster, but with a bit of shortness sometimes when a bagger tries to bag my groceries in plastic before putting them in my canvas bags, and my sister has had to tell me I was being a bitch. So I am sorry! And perhaps that young lady had real issues with hair and such assorted ickinesses (if I found a hair in my food, I would just pull it out and keep eating, and maybe that says something about me, i.e. that I am a grotesque slob and you should not eat from my kitchen? It could!), and maybe she was being as nice as she possibly could under the harrowing circumstances? No. That young lady was an asshole. HOWEVER! For the next two days, on a delightful road trip to Solvang, my companions and I were able to say to each other, acidly, “Just keep pouring your milk!” whenever someone needed to be reminded to keep pouring the milk.

So that asshole young lady gave us really some unalloyed joy in Solvang, a fairly stupid little town that needs some unalloyed joy, since if you go wander the garden at the Santa Ynez Mission on the edge of town, you’ll read signs about how they kicked out all the Indians in 1855, and it’ll ruin your whole day. I would like a whole bunch of Greeks and Filipinos to immigrate in a big rush and take over Solvang, but keep it as a stupid fake-Danish tourist trap, because I think that would be funny. And that is pretty much all I think about Solvang, except that in one of the dozens and hundreds of tourist shops that shockingly still have not gone out of business, there was a T-shirt that read “If I flush, will you disappear?” And it ruined my whole day too! Man, a lot of things kept ruining my day! Which is something I actually really liked about Solvang, because I love that rush of fight-or-flight—fight please!—you get when faced with Trail-of-Tearsed Indians or unnecessarily hostile garments or young white women swinging their dicks around to put the immigrant servants in their place.

One lump, or two?

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