Leftover Coffee (McGregor)

There are five quarts of leftover brewed coffee in my freezer, labeled by date, beginning with April 14. If our morning pot of coffee hasn’t yet gone bitter, I’ll sometimes cool what’s left, pour it into one of the plastic deli containers piled in the cupboard, and store it in the back of the freezer. I top off each frozen container until it’s full. When the plastic containers are used up, I’ve got a few empty pickle jars I can use.

The brewed coffee in our house is a blend: half high-end, half the kind my parents drank when coffee was just coffee. I want to make the good stuff last because, well, you never know. I also bought a large size container of powdered Coffeemate, an extreme measure, comparable to hoarding tins of sardines, because maybe at some point I won’t be able to get half and half. Or milk.

This is clearly pandemic-think, a scarcity mentality part Little House on the Prairie, part Walking Dead. Except rather than worrying about panthers springing out of trees, dust bowls, flesh-eating monsters, overflowing morgues or a plague with no cure, I’ve latched onto an obsession with a morning cuppa joe.

***

In college I was a waitress at a concrete-block steakhouse with large paintings of bullfighters and signed photographs of pro golfers on the walls. On Fridays and Saturdays, the line for a table filled a long, skinny hallway.

Every time I entered the kitchen to fetch brutally hot platters of Boston strips, there were two people in my immediate field of vision. On the right was Al, the grizzled chef with a blurred anchor tattoo from his Navy days, grilling steaks with a Camel non-filter dangling from the corner of his mouth.

On the left, tucked away by the shelves of gallon-sized jugs of industrial-grade soap, was Nell. Tall and angular, she seemed permanently bent in half over a huge stainless steel tub of dishes and pans she and a helper washed by hand. Whatever I saw of her face was bathed in steam and perspiration. Mostly I remember the top of her head—pinned-up wavy hair the color of steel wool, flattened under a hairnet.

One night at closing time, as I went to dump the last pot of coffee down the bar sink, Nell appeared at my side. It was the first time I’d seen her out of the kitchen, standing at full height.

She pointed to the coffee pot. “If you’re throwing that away,” she said, “I’ll take it home.” I must have looked at her quizzically.

“Tastes just fine when you warm it up in the morning.” She seemed impatient with my ignorance. “Coffee’s expensive!”

She held a just-washed, restaurant-size salad dressing jar. “Here’s what you do when the coffee’s still hot so the glass don’t break.” She put a table knife in the jar and poured in the coffee. The jar blossomed with steam but didn’t crack.

I knew nothing of Nell except the way her body bent in half over someone else’s dirty dishes. I was a college girl, the world unrolling before me like a carpet of unearned opportunities, a product of the G.I. bill and my parents’ long, slow climb to a life you could still call middle class.

Like my parents, Nell was of a generation old enough to remember saving up wartime ration tickets for sugar and butter. But my parents’ lean years had eventually eased. Nell was likely born poor, trapped her whole life in a broken system that forces a woman too old by any standard of human decency to sweat over pots and pans to make rent. The distance from the restaurant kitchen to the dining room was a matter of yards. But there was little chance she’d ever find a seat there, eating a steak cooked to her liking.

I’m not sure if my containers of frozen coffee are a paranoid hedge against want. It feels a little over the top, given that I’m sitting in my own kitchen, stocked with plenty of food. But maybe that’s the point of it, a sharp reminder of the difference between imagined and real need. The difference between scarcity mentality and scarcity.

The first time I saw Nell outside the kitchen, I realized how tall she stood. She had no time for foolishness. Dumping a pot of perfectly good coffee wasn’t just wasteful. It made no sense at all.

She still has more to teach me.

Marsha McGregor's essays have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, BrainChild, Zone 3, Fourth Genre, Literary Mama and four anthologies. Since 2008 she’s been a contributing columnist for Cleveland Magazine. She leads writing workshops for Literary Cleveland, The International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG) and library systems. www.marshamcgregor.com.