Outside the Disbelief room the woman was waiting for her.
“Better now?” the woman asked.
“Who are you?” Berni whispered. “Is this heaven or hell?”
The woman smiled. “I’m Pauline, and this is neither heaven nor hell. It’s the Kitchen.”
“The Kitchen? I just died, and I get sent to the Kitchen?” Her voice was rising in hysteria.
Pauline didn’t seem in the least perturbed by her manner. “The Kitchen is a…I believe in your time you would call it a halfway house. It’s between heaven and hell. It’s for women only—not for bad women, not for good women—it’s for women who don’t quite deserve heaven or hell.”
Berni just stood there gaping, her mouth open.
“It’s a place for women who…” Pauline thought a moment. “For example, it’s for all those religious women who spout Bible verses and consider themselves better than everyone else. They haven’t been really bad, so to speak, so they can’t be sent to hell, yet they’ve been so judgmental they can’t really be sent directly to heaven.”
“So they’re sent here? To the Kitchen?” Berni whispered.
“Exactly.”
Pauline didn’t seem inclined to say any more, and Berni was still trying to recover from the news of her own death. “Nice dress,” she managed to say at last. “Halston?”
Pauline smiled, either not understanding or ignoring Berni’s bitchiness. “The women here are from all different time periods. You’ll see every century from earth here. There are lots of Puritans here.”
Berni felt her head reeling with all she’d learned. “Is there someplace to get a drink around here?”
“Oh, yes. What do you drink now? Bathtub gin, isn’t it?”
“That was before my time,” Berni said as they began walking, the fog clearing ahead of them.
“Whatever you drink, whatever you want, you’ll find it here.”
A moment later Pauline stopped in front of a tiny table, and on it was a tall, frosty margarita. Gratefully, Berni sat down and took a long drink as Pauline sat opposite her.
When Berni looked up, she said, “Why’s this place called the Kitchen?”
“It’s just a nickname. I’m sure it has another name, but nobody remembers it. It’s called the Kitchen because it’s like women’s life on earth. When you die you think you’re going to heaven, just as you think, when you get married, that you’re going to have heaven on earth. Instead, in both cases, you get sent to the Kitchen.”
Berni nearly choked on her drink. She would have laughed, but instead her eyes widened in horror. “You don’t mean I’m going to have to spend eternity cooking and…and cleaning out the refrigerator, do you?” Can a dead person commit suicide, she wondered.
“Oh, no, nothing like that. This place is very nice. Very nice. In fact, it’s so nice many women never want to leave. They never do their assignments correctly, and they’ve been here for centuries.”
“What assignments?” Berni asked suspiciously, still reeling with horror at the idea of years of cleaning floors and sinks and ovens and cooking a damned turkey every Thanksgiving.
“Every woman in the Kitchen is given, from time to time, a task to perform. She’s to help someone on earth. The tasks are always different. Sometimes a woman is to help someone who’s grieving, sometimes she’s to help someone to make a decision. There are lots of different assignments. If you fail, you stay here.”
“And if you succeed in helping the person, what do you get?”
“Eventually, heaven.”
“Is heaven full of this fog?”
Pauline shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never been there, but I imagine it’s better than this.”
“All right,” Berni said, standing, “lead me to my first task. I don’t want to stay in a place even named the Kitchen.”
Pauline stood, and the table, chairs, and empty glass disappeared. She started walking, Berni behind her.
Berni was thinking hard about what Pauline had told her. “Help someone on earth?” she muttered, then she stopped.