Center Buns
Perfection!
I worked in a small bakery in New Jersey along with two girlfriends for three years while in high school. The baked goods were mostly Jewish specialties (of which I previously knew nothing about coming from a non-Jewish family): raspberry, chocolate, and poppy seed rugelach; hamantaschen; hard (or “kaiser” rolls); onion and white mountain rolls; rye breads (plain, marble, or with black or caraway seeds); bagels; babka, both chocolate and cinnamon; prune, cheese, and apricot danish; victory cakes; Napoleans; crumb buns; jelly and cream filled donuts; fruit “pizza”; marzipan petit fours; cinnamon and almond (my favorite) buns; salt “sticks”; and assorted small butter cookies which were brought in from another larger bakery. Sheet and layer cakes with personalized messages written with pastel-colored icing were special ordered.
We arrived after school and Saturdays and Sundays to take our spots behind the glass counters to wait on the never-ending tide of customers, filling white paper bags and boxes with treats. Saturdays were filled with customers picking up huge orders for picnics and parties, and Sundays were spent waiting on the crowds who came in after church and the Jewish mothers who couldn’t shop on Saturdays due to their religious observance. The weekdays were staffed by older women who worked full time and stood on their feet all day in white uniforms and took buses to and from the bakery. Their backs were stooped from their tedious jobs, and they smiled wearily at us when we arrived. Our appearance was a sign that they would clock out soon and go home to their apartments and elderly husbands to fix tired dinners of some sort. Or at least that’s what we imagined their lives were like, but we thought we knew everything.
We changed into our short white uniforms (no pants allowed!) in the back room’s tiny changing area which was barely covered with a thin curtain, allowing the bakers to try (usually successfully) to peek at us in our undies. We put up with this and other creepy behaviors at this low wage job when other jobs might pay more because we could walk to the bakery together after school and chat when out of earshot of the prickly owner. She wouldn’t even let us wear rubber gloves to clean the floor and display cases with rags and hot ammonia water at closing time. Rubber gloves might leave fingerprints!
Along with red rashes on our hands from the ammonia, the other hazard was the bread slicing machine; I was recently in a bakery and saw one that had a safety guard over the blades and realized how dangerous was the one we had used. Once I didn’t retract my hand quickly enough after loading in a loaf of rye and it fell on my arm, nearly breaking my wrist. The owner just hissed at me under her breath to be more careful. The other machine we respected was the one that tied the string around the boxes. Its ancient metal c-shaped arm darted down lightning-fast as we held the box for the first loop and then turned the box ninety degrees for the second loop. One of my co-worker’s fingers was broken by this devilish contraption, but nothing was ever done to change the process or purchase a newer safer machine. Any accidents were seen as our “carelessness.”
The bakery employed a pair of cake decorators, two wisecracking middle-aged guys who stood at a wide table in the back room scooping pre-made colored icing out of barrels and stuffing it into greasy piping bags. They spun the cakes around on turntables while smoothing out the icing on the sides with a ridged scraper, and then expertly squeezed out thick squiggly trim along the cakes’ edges and applied green leaves and pastel roses over the tops. They used small piping bags to write messages on the cakes: “Happy Birthday Jason,” “Congratulations Mona,” “Happy Anniversary Milton and Ruth” or whatever the customer ordered. We did have a few blank cakes on hand for last minute orders, but if a customer wanted it inscribed right away and the decorators had left for the day, one of us would try a hand at the task. Our cake decorating skills were less than stellar, and many customers winced when they viewed our lopsided handiwork, but what could they do? After all, they were the ones who had neglected to place their order in advance.
Directly opposite the table where the cake decorators worked sat a wall of tall shelves to hold the special orders. When a customer came to pick up an order, we would retrieve it from the shelves. However, the cake decorators would have moved all the orders to the top shelves which required us to reach up high which lifted the back of our uniforms to panty level, eliciting low whistles and salty comments from the pair. We were all fifteen or sixteen years old, and the decorators were married men with families. Yuck.
To be waited on in order of one’s arrival in the bakery, customers pulled a number from the ticket dispenser next to the entrance. Most bakeries and delicatessens employ such a system, but on Sunday mornings when customers inevitably chose as part of their orders a half-dozen crumb buns, the tickets became valuable to trade to “newbie” customers who didn’t realize how we were required to apportion the buns on the large sheet trays. Each tray held a total of thirty-two buns which were sold in portions no smaller than a half-dozen and were pre-sliced as such by the owner. This meant that each of the four sets of buns on the corners included a CORNER BUN! These stiff-edged buns were not as soft and cake-like as the center buns due to their location on the tray, and under no circumstances were we allowed to select buns other than what was next in order on the tray. If a customer noticed that their set of buns would include a corner bun, she would fake “not being ready to order” and offer to trade her number to the customer in line behind her. Sometimes it would be a staring contest with customers who did not want a corner bun as they indicated their displeasure with their situation, but the owner would side-eye us to make sure we were following the procedure correctly.
The prized half-dozen buns which occurred just twice on each tray were the two in the center; no edges or corners, each just six pillows of soft yellow sweet cake topped with a thick sugary streusel layer. Experienced customers would try their best to estimate how their place in line might gift them with these miracles, but if a customer ahead of them ordered a full dozen or (rarely) no crumb buns at all, their chance at scoring bun perfection would lessen. It was a bakery gamble that only the most experienced customers won.
If we dropped a roll or a loaf of bread on the floor in the process of packaging it for a customer, the owner would make a big show of removing it to the back room. As soon as the customers left who may have witnessed the item being dropped, the owner would bring out the dropped item and place it right back on the shelf. At the end of the day, if an item remained that she forgot to put back out for sale, she would “generously” offer it to one of us to take home. Gee, thanks! I don’t recall any kind or encouraging words from the owner, no matter how hard I worked, stayed late without being paid extra, or kept smiling when dealing with difficult customers (of which there were many!), and this influenced my grudging acceptance of similar behavior at subsequent jobs. I viewed employment as a situation where one had to endure meanness, sexual harassment, and general frustration, never receiving or even expecting positive or constructive feedback on my work performance.
It was after many similar college, career, and life experiences later that I realized that it didn’t matter which rung on the work ladder one was standing; bad bosses and teachers are everywhere, and it was up to me to find the “center buns” in each situation or to move on. I’ve been fortunate to seek out and even occasionally find a supportive “center bun” to restore my faith in the goodness I believe is inherent in everyone.
