My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [65]
“Maybe if you keep going in the direction he went, you’ll find more cabs,” she suggests. This? Right here? Is why Angie’s kind of a genius.127
“Good call. I’m off.” I begin to hike across the hill, rather than up or down it. “Anyway, I start to ask the lady about other kinds of tea. I tell her my favorite is English Breakfast because it’s bold enough to put milk in. She nods like maybe she’s starting to understand me and scurries over to this enormous inlaid apothecary chest—which Wendy would kill for, by the way—and starts opening tiny drawers. She pulls out some small containers and begins the whole boiling-water-cup-cup-cup dealie over. I try other varieties and they’re all nice. But it’s tea and not wine, so I’m not losing my mind over them or anything.”
“Like when you didn’t have any protein and you joined all those wine clubs last year?”
“Exactly. So, because I feel like we’re finally communicating, I ask her all conversational-like what their best stuff in the store is and what’s the most popular and it’s cup, cup, cup again. And the whole time, she’s smiling and saying, ‘Youli’?’ and I yes, I do like, thank you. But at this point, I’ve had about all the tea I can hold, so I’m ready to make my purchase and get out. I kind of gesture to the register and she gets my drift.”
“Oh my God, you spent over a hundred dollars on tea? Is Fletch going to murder you?”
A bitter laugh escapes me. “He’s not going to kill me for spending a hundred. He’s going to kill me for spending FOUR HUNDRED GODDAMNED DOLLARS!”
“Holy shit! What did you buy?”
“I told you I somehow agreed to buy a pound of each of the jasmine pearls. But apparently when I was trying all the other varietals, my ‘I like’ translates to ‘Yes, I shall take them all, many pounds, please.’ ”
“What, you got ten different kinds? Are you going to have tea parties every day with your dogs?”
“No, just four. Two jasmine, one breakfast-type tea, and apparently a bag of their ‘finest,’ which was a hundred and eighty dollars a pound! And I’m all ‘What is this?’ and she says it’s organic bird tongue and then she fucking winks! What does the wink mean? Did I just accidentally ugly-American-loud-talk my way into buying heroin or something? Or am I actually drinking a tea made from the genuine inside of bird’s mouths?”
Angie clucks her tongue. “Jen, you’re being a dumb ass. Why didn’t you just say no?”
“Because she didn’t understand me! I couldn’t say no in Chinese.”
“You realize you could have called Wendy or Jen at that point. Both of them know conversational Chinese.” Stupid show-off multilingual friends.
“Yeah, thanks. That would have been really valuable information to have, like, five minutes ago.”
“Then you should have shaken your head to mean no.”
Quietly, I admit, “I thought if I protested too much, she’d send me home with a gremlin.”
“And now . . . you’ve lost me. What does that mean?”
“Not important. What IS important is that my credit card was an instant Berlitz course. As soon as she had an authorization number and a signature, she became fluent! Like she spoke transactional English only.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, it was a little mind-blowing. After I signed my slip, she was all, ‘Hey, thanks for coming in. I hope you enjoy everything.’ Like the second she had my money she was allowed to break character. She still had an accent, but nothing like what she’d had twenty minutes earlier.”
“Do you feel gypped at all?”
“Honestly? Not really.” I recently found out the guys who row the gondolas at the Venetian in Vegas aren’t actually Italian, even though they speak with a heavy accent; it’s just part of the act. I’m betting that’s what happened here today, but I can’t say I mind because I felt like I was really having a cultural experience in the middle of it. Maybe this is why places like Disneyland are so successful—everyone pretty much gets