from A Hard Day’s Night:
I used to have a job cracking eggs. I was eighteen and my shift started at 6 a.m. and I’d wake up at 5:55, put on some clothes I found on the floor and run up the hill to the student center. My egg-cracking job was at a dining hall called the Ram’s Den and all the basketball players always hung out there, like the one who ended up a Los Angeles Laker and married one of the Kardashian sisters and guest-starred on the Entourage episode where Johnny Drama wants to get calf implants. Anyway, I worked salad prep. Sometimes I’d have to chop up heads of lettuce that had soaked in tap water all night long. The first step of lettuce-chopping was to slice off the stem, then reach up inside and twist my fingers around to grab at the core, which always felt vaguely sexual, in a fun and fumbling sort of way.
But the egg-cracking, that was the most fun. The eggs were boiled and cooled and stacked in huge silver bowls, dozens of eggs all piled up, always with white shells. I’d take an egg and roll it back and forth on the counter, let it go crunch crunch crunch till there were cracks everywhere. And then I’d peel the shell away, get the stabby little shards under my fingernails and try to find a nice big unshattered piece to strip off and toss into the mountain of broken shells by the side of the bowl. The best is when your nail snags on that silky white film and you pull so gently and lift it up and skin the whole damn thing in one smooth swoop and there’s your egg, naked and shining in the shitty fluorescent light.
It was so meditative, all that egg-peeling. It was so good to think only of eggshells, instead of how last night I’d kissed my ex-boyfriend behind my best friend’s back and how she was his ex-girlfriend too and possibly still sleeping with him even though she had another boyfriend now and she claimed to also be in love with me and I liked to pretend I was in love with her too.
Love was so bad back then. What a waste of being eighteen, of the freedom to be fun and fumbling about everything in the world.
(Liz)
