The woman behind the counter looked confusedly at the bun and meat that lay steaming before her. An older man, with gray thinning hair and thin-rimmed glasses that formed silver circles around his eyes, was scolding her thorough his thick accent.
“No mayonnaise, no queso. You get that? No queso! You…I tell you!” He scolded her further when he saw a baked potato on the counter, white and steaming, but devoid of cheese. “What I tell you?” the man said with timid fury, “Queso! I tell you put the queso on and you…I tell you this!” The woman looked at the potato and nonchalantly placed melted cheese on it before the customer arrived. The cashier too had been involved in this broken English verbal lashing. He rang up other customers, but with a contemptuous eye on the older woman. She seemed like a respectable woman. A woman who should have been doing something dignified, something becoming of a lady of her age and experience. She seemed awkward and timid in her outfit, yet strangely defiant. She knew that making a potato without queso didn’t matter, whether the old white-mustachioed man did or not.
I received my order. It was a triple hamburger, without mayonnaise and without cheese. I happily sauntered to my lonely, sticky, hard, plastic seat. I opened my sandwich to find yellow goo overflowing from beneath the bun and seeping onto the three patties of firmly pressed meat. I had seen what they had done to the poor woman, but decided to go up anyway. I hate cheese. I said to the old man, in the most polite way I possibly could, that I believed that this was cheese on my sandwich.
“How could you do this?! How many time I tell you no queso! I tell you no queso and you put the queso! What are you doing?!”
I stood in horror. She tried to mutter something. She obviously did not know the English equivalent to what she was trying to say. She stuttered something in a low, timid voice. A man beside me, dressed in a full skin-tight, striped baseball uniform and with a darkly tan Hispanic, mustached face said, “Mustard.” The woman agreed. She pointed and testified with exasperation, “Mustard!!”
“I’m sorry!” I said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I said, scurrying back from whence I came.
“Well, you put too much.” The old man said.
I ate my meal quietly. I kept thinking, guiltily chewing at the fact that I desperately wanted to apologize to the woman. I wanted to have the nerve to march up to her and say, with as much sorrow as I could possibly muster (no pun intended), that I was truly sorry and that the two men were treating her horribly. But I thought back to the defiant look in her eye. I thought back to the look on her face when she was admonished for trivial quibbles, and the proud streak that she has probably always had.
I realized something that night. I have always had a habit of ascribing characteristics to people I don’t know. Not in a judgmental way, but in a way to better understand them, a desire to know the person behind the fast-food visor. But, who am I to create entire personalities and then forgive them? Who am I to say that this woman was not ignorant and insolent, a troublemaker and obviously attempting to be a menace to her coworkers?
As she brushed passed me to walk outside, I kicked myself for not having the courage to apologize.