Episode 7: The Many Uses of a Meat Mallet
Gloria and Mo
Photo by JZHunt from Getty Images (text added)
NOTE: Episodes 7 and 8 tell the story of how Gloria and her dog Mo ended up on Looser Island running a glorious French restaurant.
Gloria’s history (in Episode 8) touches on addiction, abortion, and suicide. The Dogs of Looser Island remains a story of dogs and their ridiculous humans, and there is gentle resolution for Gloria and Mo, in keeping with the promise of happy distraction, but I wanted you to be aware so you can make your own decision about whether to read or skip Episode 8.
(There no paywall for either Episode 7 or Episode 8 – both episodes are available to all, with or without a subscription.)
Episode 7: The Many Uses of a Meat Mallet
You might wonder how an entire island decided en masse—including its only lawyer and one of its two law enforcement officers (but not including the person who reported Paulo to ICE, apparently)—to ignore the law, and shelter Paulo. Well, I’ll tell you: they had experience choosing humanity over strict compliance.
For the longest time, no one was really sure where Gloria came from, or who she was before she arrived on Looser Island.
That isn’t unusual on this small island tucked modestly amid its more ostentatious neighbors in the San Juan archipelago, as pretty much everyone who isn’t a second- or third- or even fourth-generation islander is an escapee from a past that remains, by choice, largely hidden.
She arrived at least a decade before Paulo was found and then lost, of that much everyone was sure, but the Gloria-before-now was a mystery.
Gloria herself is unremarkable, a petite woman with short, unassuming curls of an indistinct color that makes it difficult to accurately guess her age (other than somewhere north of forty and south of fifty), a soft voice, and a face that is attractive but not exceptionally so.
Mo, however, is a Presence.
Mo is a Great Pyrenees—a mix, Gloria is quick to say, because on Looser Island owning a pure breed is considered just this side of shameful. It is pretentious, a sign you think of your pet as a status symbol, like a flashy car or an expensive piece of furniture. (And therefore it comes as no surprise to anyone that Cherry Duluth has a purebred Pomeranian). Mutt is the preferred type, though the Coombs’s greyhound is forgiven, because she’s a rescue from racing. Anyway, whatever Mo is mixed with, the percentage of non-Great Pyrenees must be very, very small; the dog reportedly weighs in at one hundred fifty two pounds. His outer coat alone (he has three coats) consists of six-inch-long hair. That’s how he got his name, Gloria explains to anyone who asks. Within a week of adopting Mo, Gloria and every item of clothing she owned was covered with a layer of beautiful white hair, and she decided if she called him Mo she could say she was wearing mohair.
Together they get the proverbial double take, like a team in a slapstick routine or a child’s picture book: Tiny and Mr. Big Go for a Walk.
At some point—no one can remember when—Gloria took over the island’s only fine dining establishment and renamed it La Maison du Chien. If you don’t remember your high school French, that translates as “The Dog House.” Pursuant to the unwritten rules of the island, everyone refused to use the French name, and insisted on calling it The Dog House Café. Within a year after Gloria commissioned the sign, with its French words and curlicued letters, and hung it over the entry, the sign was completely covered by clematis and other greenery, and the islanders quickly forgot it had any other name.
Gloria and Mo live in a one-bedroom cabin behind the restaurant, a tiny cabin tacked onto the land by the original restaurant owners because they needed a place to stay and no one thought much about permits and building codes at the time. To the south, the unromantically-named “Spit” holds other houses, most much grander than Gloria’s little home, and The Dog House Café sits directly in front of (to the north of) the cabin. The east side of the cabin abuts the Village Commons (referenced sometimes with, and sometimes without, capital letters, depending on the preference of the speaker), and the windows on the west side of the cabin gaze out over the capricious waters of the Salish Sea. It is rumored that Gloria and Mo sleep in a California king-sized bed together, with the dog curled protectively, if somewhat oppressively, around his human. (That’s only conjecture—to this day, no one but Sheriff Tom has ever been in the cabin, not even Gloria’s closest friends. That’s how private Gloria is.)
During the day, Mo is allowed in the restaurant before and after closing, and he hangs out in the screened porch off the restaurant during business hours. He gets a regular stroll around the Village before the breakfast shift, before the lunch shift, and before and after the dinner shift. Gloria is scrupulous about picking up after Mo, which is a good thing, since Mo is prolific in that regard—Gloria likes to point out he obviously has a very healthy colon. Seeing the two of them out for their regular constitutional is a comforting predictability, like Big Ben striking the hour in London, or the call to prayer in Istanbul.
Mo is a serious dog, which is not to say he is unfriendly. It is (apparently) important to him to make a firsthand appraisal when meeting someone. If you are a stranger, he will stand up, place his gigantic front paws on your shoulders, and gaze intently into your eyes, before solemnly licking you, ever so gently, on the tip of your nose.
The Mo benediction and seal of approval.
Until the events of the fateful year (the year I’m going to tell you about), almost no one had failed to pass muster. Well, okay, there was one time. Gloria likes to tell the story of the man with the overly-wide smile who tried to come into the restaurant when she was alone, getting ready to open for dinner. Mo looked him over, she says, and then stood squarely in the man’s way, refusing him entry. When the man tried to step around him, Mo growled. It was a quiet kind of growl, Gloria says, casual and almost courteous, as if to say, “This is a friendly warning. You might think twice about taking another step. It’s up to you, of course.”
Mo is wonderful with children. His only fault, if you can call it that, is a tendency to decide he knows better than they what is needed, and to herd them, calmly but insistently, wherever he intends them to go. Many a toddler has found herself firmly blocked from the slide or any other playground equipment Mo decides is questionable.
The point is this: everyone knows Mo. Everyone knows his habits and his character and his history. But for a long time all that was known of Gloria’s pre-Looser Island days was that she was married before but now is not, she attended some well-known culinary program in Paris and graduated with honors (the plaque is proudly displayed on the restaurant wall), and she paid cash for the restaurant.
And that nobody, but nobody, can out-cook Gloria.
The restaurant is communal asset as much as eatery. Most of the island’s young people work at The Dog House Café at some point before sailing off in search of another universe, something not so close and familiar and, well, so very here. Many of them, possibly even most, have no work skills to speak of when they arrive, but Gloria’s philosophy seems to be that as long as you come to work in some semblance of on-timeness, smile at the customers, and wash your hands after you go to the bathroom, you’re hired.
There was a kid, about a year ago—the rumor’s outgrown the truth, as so often happens, but everyone is pretty sure it was the Swartouts’ son, Mark—who had to be fired. Here’s how that went down, according to local lore.
Tourist One: “The tri-tip, is it pasture-raised beef?”
Mark: “Uh, I dunno. I guess?
Tourist Two: “How long is it aged?”
Mark: “Mmph.”
Tourist One: “Can it be made without the caramelized shallots? I don’t know why people put shallots on everything these days. I hate shallots.”
Tourist Two (before Mark can make any response, even an idiotic one): “I think I want the cobb salad to start, but could you ask the chef to make sure not to boil the eggs too hard? Everyone boils the eggs too hard.”
Mark: “Okay.”
Tourist One: “Tell me about the salmon. What’s the deal with cedar-planks? And I thought eating salmon was a no-no for all you whale-huggers.”
Mark (showing a little spine, the tiniest spark of personality): “Well, the humans are eating the salmon and blocking off their, you know, their rivers and stuff, and the orcas are dying. And their babies. Did you see the news about that mom-whale that carried the dead baby-whale on her back for, like, forever?”
Tourist Two: “Better skip the salmon. We don’t want to be tarred and feathered and run off the island on a rail.”
Tourist One: “Yeah, I can’t swim very well!” They laugh much louder and longer than the joke deserves. “So tell me about the Ahi tuna.”
Mark: “Look, I’ll, I’ll just put you down for the steak, okay?” He pivots and walks back toward the kitchen in what he clearly hopes is a decisive manner.
Strike that. The rumors are wrong. What really happened was that Mark continued to stand there dithering until Gloria came over and told the tourist he was having steak and if he didn’t like it he could go to Retha’s Bar and Grill and try that shit on Retha.
(We know the rumors are wrong because Gloria after Gloria heard the story she corrected the narrator, and set the story straight.)
Back to the history of the restaurant. Looser Island has no seedy tavern—Retha’s Bar and Grill doesn’t count, Retha serves honest burgers and sweet potato fries and northwest microbrewery beer—so The Dog House Café is one of only two options for a well-made Tom Collins or a glass of cabernet from a local winery. It even has a traditional bar that looks into the kitchen where the magic happens. Pretty much everyone of drinking age ends up sitting at the bar at some point, and something about the lacquered teak surface splits your soul and makes you spill its contents like a piñata or one of those plastic tubes filled with tiny colorful beads, and you tell the bartender everything, even things you’ve never told anyone else, and Gloria, cooking up a storm behind the bartender, hears everything.
As a result, Gloria knows just about everything there is to know about anything on Looser Island.
She knows Larry Coombs hates being a lawyer and was terrified of the idea of adopting a child right up until the day it happened.
She knows Susan Droske wonders if she made a mistake shutting Bill Butteford out of their daughter’s life, wonders if by trying to protect herself from uncomfortable entanglements she hurt not only Bill and his mother Lauren but also, more importantly, Marta, depriving her of father and grandmother.
Once, Susan had given herself permission to come down for a drink (Marta was hanging out with her teacher for the evening), and because she rarely drank, halfway through the cocktail she was a soggy drunk. “You . . . you can’t live your life based on what’s best for other people, can you?” Susan said, to which the bartender replied, “Can’t you?” and Gloria added, “It’s not the kind of thing you can know in retrospect. You kind of have to make the decision and then see what happens.”
Gloria knows Jim Perkins is pining after Lauren Butteford (though of course that’s Looser Island’s worst-kept secret), and she knows that may come to nothing, because Lauren’s heart vibrates to an atonal hum of grief and loss that exists outside the hearing range of most ordinary humans.
All of which is to say, again, that Gloria knows pretty much everything about everyone.
But no one knew much about Gloria.
Until one day, they did.
Saturdays on the island are pretty much like any other day. During the summer, there are tourists, but they’ve left their freneticism behind, for the most part. During the winter, people pick up groceries and walk their dogs and attend the kids’ basketball games and clean their houses, just like people everywhere, except that the pace is slower because there’s just not very far to go, no matter where it is you have to get to, unless of course the basketball game is on another island or the mainland. Even then, your pace is dictated by the ferry schedule, so there’s really no point in hurrying except to get in line for the ferry.
On this particular Saturday, Elder Jack Roth—pay attention now, because that’s important: as an Elder in the Presbyterian church, he should have known better—and a few of his friends from the mainland had come into the restaurant for a kind of informal college reunion. They had pushed several tables together and ordered the vichyssoise (breaking a personal rule that you should never eat anything you can’t pronounce, or that doesn’t use all the letters in its name). Those who had wives or girlfriends had declared this a Guy Date, and they’d decided what the hell, might as well have a couple of shots of bourbon to go with the crazy-name French soup, and then a hot toddy, because it was bitterly cold and wet outside (almost but not quite cold enough to snow, which is a constant complaint on the island in the winter).
George, Jack’s least favorite friend, was soused.
George looked across the bar into the kitchen where Gloria was flattening chicken breasts with a meat mallet, and he whistled at her, and said something along the lines of I’d sure like it if you used those strong hands on me baby. The other men were embarrassed, though they tried to tell themselves it was no big deal, and Jack punched George on the shoulder, and told him to shut up dickhead. (Jack was normally reserved about obscenities, but he reverted to college vocabulary around his college friends.)
The punch and the profanity rolled off George, unnoticed. He stood up and made his way unsteadily toward the kitchen, with all the other diners watching (there were only about six people, besides the mini-reunion).
“Come on, honey, you know you want me. And at your age” (only he said at yer ayshe), “who else is gonna have you? Come on, baby,” he said. “Come to papa.”
Gloria didn’t even stop to wipe the chicken blood off the mallet. She walked out of the kitchen and around the bar with slow, measured steps, looking into George’s eyes just as if she were Mo, taking measure, while he stood and grinned and opened his arms, and then she hit him on the head with the mallet, and he crumpled at her feet.
“I think you’d better call Sheriff Tom,” Gloria said softly, as if it didn’t matter, as if it wasn’t she who had flattened a man in her restaurant on a cold, rainy, Saturday afternoon.
Next time
Episode 8: Sheriff Tom Decides
Love that comment about pure-breed shame on Looser Island. Spot on😆