Secrets and Lies in the School Cafeteria
Late on a fall afternoon, a skeleton crew staffed the cafeteria at New Canaan High School, in Connecticut. Custodial workers cleaned up the day’s remains while one of the cooks prepped for the evening’s athletic banquet.
A woman entered quietly through the back door, the one designated for deliveries and employees. She wore a jacket over a loose gown. She clutched something to her chest that appeared to be a bag connected to an IV.
“What are you doing here?” one of the workers asked.
The woman said nothing. She shuffled to her small office. The door clicked shut. The workers exchanged looks. They’d heard that Marie Wilson had been undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She had every right to stay home and rest. Yet here she was, hobbling into the kitchen near sunset, reporting for duty.
There would be more days like this one. Days when Wilson endured life’s worst moments—a grandson’s leukemia diagnosis, successive surgeries for a wrenched wrist, a foreclosure. On every one, without fanfare, she made an appearance in the cafeteria.
To some, Wilson’s unfailing attendance was an act of dedication, the fastidiousness of a woman charged with helping to feed some of the country’s wealthiest children. The job didn’t lend itself to missteps. This was New Canaan, a sylvan place of old-money mansions and modern farmhouses built with Wall Street bonuses. Standards were high—for the students, for the teachers, for the administration. The cafeterias were no exception.
Headed by Bruce Gluck, a classically trained chef, the kitchens of the New Canaan public schools served farm-to-table fare before such a label existed. Gluck pushed his workers hard, demanding that they achieve his formidable vision. The workers were largely immigrant women, many of them Italians for whom English was a second language. Clashes inevitably arose, and when they did, Gluck turned to his second in command. Wilson knew how to talk to the women; she could explain what he wanted.
Wilson had grown up in neighboring Stamford; her father was an Italian immigrant and trash hauler whose everlasting advice to his children was that they surround themselves with respectable people. After a deli she owned shut down, Wilson got a job in a school cafeteria in New Canaan and moved into a modest house there. A year after Wilson was hired, her younger sister, Joann Pascarelli, got a cafeteria job there too. Together, they rose in the ranks, Wilson to assistant director of food services, and Pascarelli to manager of the middle school’s cafeteria.
For two decades, the sisters ran the cafeterias with an iron fist. Workers bore them grudging respect. But resentment bubbled too, and curiosity: Every year at Christmas, at the party Wilson hosted, the women stared in amazement at her house, and her
