Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Read online

  I take inventory of the situation. His date is pouting smugly. She’s really enjoying this. He is a bit of a parody, wearing a gold pinkie ring, a heavy gold bracelet, and enough gold neck chains to choke a horse. When he speaks, he sounds like a bad imitation of Billy Crystal doing Fernando Lamas. He’s got Witness Protection Program written all over him. She has a very pretty face, which is spoiled by an inch-thick layer of makeup. She’s wearing very little jewelry and often clutches at her purse, which she’s kept within reaching distance as if she might need to bolt at any second. Her body-hugging pantsuit is understated but looks expensive. The thought of getting into it with these two is suddenly exhausting. I just don’t have the stomach for it tonight. And in the split second I stand there contemplating my next move, I change my mind about my entire plan. Why not give them what they want? It’s not as if I don’t have the time to go the extra mile for them. I decide I’ll even go talk to the chef, despite possible risks to my own mental health. Their date is obviously not going that well. Perhaps, I think, I can help to make this a better evening for them.

  “Just a second,” I tell them, “I’ll be right back.”

  I approach the chef, who is so bored on this slow night that he’s removing the bones from a sea bass at tableside. Normally, he’s not overly fond of appearing in front of customers.

  “I need you,” I whisper to him.

  “Oh really?” he says, raising his eyebrows suggestively.

  “Yes, really.”

  As soon as the sea bass has been sufficiently ripped to flaky shreds, the chef follows me to the table. My couple seems quite surprised to see him there.

  “I’ve brought the chef out personally to speak to you,” I tell them.

  “Oh, this is wonderful,” Mr. Gold Chains says. The chef is totally ingratiating, although I can tell he is barely containing his inherently sarcastic streak.

  “I just want some shrimp scampi,” Gold Chains says.

  “Well, I don’t have the large prawns,” the chef says. “I have only the smaller ones, but I can make a plate with those if you want.”

  “Fantastic,” Gold Chains says.

  “So I make a plate with the shrimp and a little olive oil and garlic?”

  “Maybe a little pasta.”

  “You want pasta as well?”

  “I don’t know. You decide. Yes, OK, pasta.”

  “You’ve got to give me a little more information,” the chef says. “I can make it for you, but you have to tell me what you like.”

  They hash out the details a little longer while I watch. Finally the chef departs.

  “He seems very nice,” Gold Chains tells me.

  “Tonight,” I respond.

  “Oh really, ha ha, he isn’t like that all the time?”

  “I’m just kidding,” I say, smiling.

  “Thank you for bringing him over,” Gold Chains says.

  “Yes,” his date says acidly, “thank you.”

  They’ve gotten what they wanted. Everybody’s happy. Life is wonderful.

  “We’ll have another glass of cabernet,” Gold Chains tells me. The date shakes her head no and he overrides her again.

  I have to wonder what the story is between these two. Their body language offers a few clues. They’re sitting on the same side of the table, but she holds herself back from him, unconsciously shielding her prominent breasts with crossed arms. He leans toward her as she inches back, his arm slung over the back of her chair. There is a palpable tension between them. Judging from the proprietary tone he takes with her, this can’t be their first date. Nor are they married. For one thing, her left fourth finger is bare. For another, married couples very rarely sit on the same side of the table. So, I’d guess third or fourth date. He seems to want to get her drunk. Another sign. Maybe they met through the personals.

  Their dinners arrive shortly and I have to chuckle as I walk the plates over to them. For Gold Chains, the chef has prepared a barely modified version of a dish we already have on the menu. If the customer had bothered to look at said menu, he could have easily ordered this meal himself.

  “Looks wonderful,” Gold Chains says. Something has shifted in the relationship between Gold Chains and his date since I was last at the table. They seem to have come to some sort of tacit agreement. Her posture is more relaxed. He orders another glass of wine for himself after finishing hers.

  “Tell the chef that this is wonderful,” Gold Chains says. “Tell him I want to buy him a drink. Go, go tell him.”

  I leave dutifully and head to the kitchen, where the chef is busy poking his finger into several pounds of uncooked calamari.

  “He loves it,” I tell the chef.

  “Of course he loves it,” the chef says.

  “He wants to buy you a drink.”

  “You know I don’t drink,” the chef tells me.

  “He insists.”

  “Then order a bottle of Dom Pérignon and I’ll share it with you after work.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.”

  “Then charge him for the most expensive glass of wine we have and tell the bartender not to pour it.”

  “I can’t do that, it’s unethical.”

  The chef shrugs. “What do you want me to do? Tell him thank you, but no thank you.”

  “That works for me,” I tell the chef.

  For all their demands, Gold Chains and his date eat hardly any food. After a bite or two of her dinner, the date disappears into the ladies’ room. I take the opportunity to check back with Gold Chains and make sure that his specially designed meal is satisfactory.

  “Yes, it’s wonderful,” he says, “but let me tell you something.” He beckons me to come closer, to lean over to him. “This is not the first time a chef comes over to my table,” he says, blasting my face with his garlic breath. I stifle an involuntary gag reflex.

  “They always come over and they always make me what I want,” Gold Chains continues. “It’s not such a big deal for the chef to come over. They can always do it for me. You should remember that.”

  “Right. Terrific,” I tell him, “I’m glad it worked out for you.” I hightail it away from the table. I’m thinking I should have taken the chef’s advice. I should have charged this guy extra for everything. I should have added the glass of wine. There’s no respect here. With one garlicky blast, Gold Chains has managed to defeat any altruistic intent I had toward him. He doesn’t care that I’m going the extra mile for him. As far as he’s concerned, the extra mile is included with the price of the meal. I probably don’t even rate as a person.

  I’m tired of trying to relate to people on a human level. A familiar feeling washes over me. Waiting on tables, I think, is surely a bizarre way to make a living. I remember a scene from Deconstructing Harry, the Woody Allen film I saw several months ago. Woody Allen’s character is with a prostitute and he asks her how she manages to do the kind of work she does. The prostitute responds that it’s better than waitressing. Woody Allen’s character then goes on for a while about how every prostitute he’s asked about the trade has had this response. Given this, he concludes that waitressing has to be the worst job in the world. I saw the film with two other waitresses. At first we laughed when we heard this interchange. Then we applauded. Woody makes an interesting point. Waitressing may not be the worst job in the world, but prostitution does seem to have more inherent honesty about it. My mother, queen of euphemistic phrases, defined hooker for me this way when I was about twelve years old: “A hooker is a woman who is nice to men for money.” Really, I think to myself, is that so different from what I’m doing at this very moment?

  Gold Chains motions for me to clear the plates. They’ll think about dessert, he informs me. Maybe later they’ll have some coffee. He snuggles up close to his date and begins whispering in her ear. I am no longer needed or wanted at the table. I suspect it’s going to be a while before these two leave. I watch them from afar as I fold napkins and wait for a sign that they want s
omething else. As I do, I reflect again on the strangeness of my job.

  I was a teenager when I had my first waitressing job. Had anyone told me then that I’d still be hustling plates at the end of the millennium, I would have thought they were crazy. I can barely believe it now. There must be a reason, I tell myself, that I still show up for these shifts. A reason why I still play the kind of game I’ve played with Gold Chains, several times on a nightly basis.

  As I stack the napkins beside me, I disengage myself from the chatter and hum of the restaurant. I begin a process of sorting and sifting through my memories that I’ve perfected over these years of waiting on tables. I flip through the colors and sounds of my past until I come to the scene I’m looking for. I stop there, on this particular frame of memory, and allow myself to experience it once more.

  I turned sixteen in 1978. Grease was released for the first time. While none of my girlfriends would admit it, they all wanted to look like Olivia Newton-John after she put on those skinny black clothes. I was the only one I knew who thought Stockard Channing was sexier. At the very least, the character she played was much more interesting. But these were unpopular opinions and I kept them to myself.

  I began hassling my father in the spring, telling him I wanted to get a job and work in the summer like all my friends. His response was predictable: “Why do you want to get a job?” he said. “You’ve got your whole life to work. Why don’t you enjoy your freedom while you can?”

  I didn’t find my father’s logic comforting. The thought of spending another sticky summer at the poolside of the Jewish Community Center, lacing my hair with lemon juice and Sun-In in order to achieve a perfect shade of blond, was beyond depressing. The previous year had been bad enough. Serial killer Son of Sam had been on the loose until August and I’d listened to anxious matrons hypothesizing about where he might strike next— “The last one was in Yonkers, you know, it’s only a matter of time before he makes it up here. He could be here now.” The reflected sunlight from their tanning panels was blinding (nobody gave a thought to skin cancer at that point), but it beat the sight of their pudgy fourteen-year-old sons doing cannonballs into the pool. Foreigner’s “Cold As Ice” blared from the sound system several times daily. It was altogether an unpleasant memory.

  Besides all of this, I was sadly behind all of my friends in valuable life experiences. Tenth grade had been very eventful for many of my peers. Valerie Grossman, for example, had conducted a forbidden affair with a Puerto Rican boyfriend and had actually gone all the way (several times). Christmas vacation found her trotting off to Planned Parenthood for a diaphragm after a much-whispered-about pregnancy scare. The boy I’d spent the whole year pining over was graduating and going into the army. I had a sense of life passing me by as I stood on the sidelines and watched. I needed to catch up. I needed some excitement. I needed a job.

  After more nudging, my father struck a sort of compromise. “You want a job?” he said finally. “Well, I’ve got one for you. You can work in the luncheonette.”

  The luncheonette he spoke of was located in the middle of Maxman’s Cottages, a bungalow colony. Along with hotels such as The Concord, Grossinger’s, and Kutscher’s, the bungalow colony was something of an institution in our city of Monticello in upstate New York. Most of the summer tenants made the two-hour drive up from the city en famille right after school let out, and settled in. The fathers usually went back down to the city to work during the week and left the wife and kids until the weekend. Some bungalow colonies actually had themes: vegetarian, for example, or Hassidic. Maxman’s (which had seemed to have the sole theme of making as much money as possible from its renters) housed a diner, game room, “casino,” two pools, and a grocery. After Labor Day, the whole thing shut down. The owners of Maxman’s rented the bungalows and the diner out for the summer and stored enough nuts to last them through the frosty winter months. Many of the tenants had been coming up for years, effectively transporting their own neighborhoods upstate. While these makeshift communities enjoyed their peak in the 1950s and ’60s, there were still hundreds throughout the Catskills in the late ’70s.

  Looking for a change of pace and wanting eventually to open their own restaurant, my parents had decided to rent the luncheonette for the summer. It wasn’t quite a “real” job, I reckoned, since I’d be working for my parents, but it was close enough. The promise of adventure loomed large.

  My father was very creative when it came to the menu. He devised daily $1.99 lunch specials for the kids who attended day camp in the community. One day it was a burger, fries, and a soda, another day it was grilled cheese sandwiches and pickles. After a few weeks, he tried new twists on old themes. After breakfast one morning, he instructed me to make a sign saying, “Today’s Special: Las Vegas Hot Dogs.” What would those be? we all wanted to know. As my father dumped the dogs into the deep fryer instead of cooking them on the flat grill, he proclaimed, “There you go, Las Vegas Hot Dogs. Come and get ’em.”

  The luncheonette had a beautiful old soda fountain that reminded my father of his childhood days in Brooklyn diners, so he taught me and my sister to make lime rickeys and egg creams (which contain neither eggs nor cream). We had an ancient milk-shake machine in which my father made malteds. We served coffee and brewed Sanka. After a couple of weeks of trial and error, our basic menu was complete.

  It took very little time to become acquainted with the denizens, most of whom were quite friendly and liked the idea of a family running the luncheonette. For me, the local color was made considerably brighter by the addition of a large group of teens around my own age. The girls were primarily a catty bunch, concerned mostly with their hair and their tans (with the possible exception of fifteen-year-old Lori Zucker, who gave impromptu seminars on the art of fellatio from one of the luncheonette’s corner booths. “You should really learn how to do it,” she would say, “you won’t believe how much the boy likes it”).

  The boys, however, were a different story. To me, they all seemed like incredibly cool guys from the city who knew much more about life than I did. (My main source of information regarding love and romance at that point was The Thorn Birds, a book I’d read so many times it fell apart at the spine.) The first few weeks of summer saw old romances reignite and new ones form. I was a totally fresh face in the crowd and was, to my pleasure, immediately sized up as a potential girlfriend.

  My burgeoning popularity with the lads at Maxman’s didn’t mean that their parents were any less demanding when it came to their meals. As one of the luncheonette’s two waitresses (my sister Maya, thirteen at the time, was the other), I was the canary in the coal mine. My father preferred to remain behind the counter or in the kitchen. Nobody, he reckoned, was going to beat up on an innocent little sixteen-year-old. He was mistaken. For me, the luncheonette was a radical introduction into the vagaries of human nature as it pertained to service. Everybody who ate at the luncheonette was a regular. Everybody liked their meals just so and none were afraid to voice their opinions.

  There was Mr. Grubman, for example, who loudly informed the community at large that he had a bypassed intestine. Mr. Grubman ate as if trying to find a spot in the Guinness Book of Records, yet the hefty Mr. Grubman could eat only certain items. Whole meat platters disappeared down his gullet, followed by whole cheese platters. “I need my protein,” Mr. Grubman said. “You got any more of this?” My father was rarely able to keep up with Mr. Grubman’s appetite.

  Then there was little Ricky Scalini. Most mornings, Ricky hoisted himself atop a counter stool and, with the worldliness and inflections of a Scorsese character, demanded, “Gimme a bagel and coffee. Cream cheese.” Ricky was four years old. Ricky’s mother, Baby, sometimes accompanied her son. She chain-smoked and drank Tab. My father was anxious to please her because, he confided, they’d gone to the same high school. “She was a hitter,” my father said.

  By far the scariest character, however, was Sophie Zucker, grandmother of the sexually precocious Lori. The
mountainous Mrs. Zucker ate in the luncheonette almost every day, but she really hit her stride on the weekends.

  Saturday nights were our busiest. We worked until three o’clock Sunday morning. The owners of Maxman’s booked fourth-rate Catskill comedians who showed up and gave incredibly weak sets. On Saturday nights, the last set ended well after midnight. We served food throughout the night, and after the show ended on a Saturday night, the luncheonette would fill up with a ravenous crowd who ate their way into the wee hours.

  Since we were serving dinner while the shows were going on, we got to see the acts only in bits and pieces. One popular joke involved the comedian holding out his hand, fingers splayed. “Pick a finger,” he told an audience member. “Wait,” he continued, shaking his hand vigorously, “let me mix ’em up.” The locals roared with laughter and ate our hamburgers, roast pork on garlic bread (a favorite among Jewish patrons interested in flaunting the laws of kashruth), chickens baked from my mother’s memories, and submarine sandwiches. We served mostly in plastic baskets, but sometimes, on Saturday nights, we used real china.

  Sophie Zucker was usually first in line for the roast pork on garlic bread, and every time she ate it, without fail, she called me over. I always approached her table with a sense of dread.

  “Duhlink,” she said in heavily accented English, “ask your fuhdder to put a little more meat on the samvich. Please, duhlink, look at dis.” She held the sandwich open. It always seemed as if there was more than enough meat on the sandwich and on the towering Mrs. Zucker to feed a small country of starving children. Yet, somehow, there was never enough meat for Mrs. Zucker.

  The first time this happened, I’d carried the sandwich back to my father in the kitchen, where he was sweating over Mr. Grubman’s platters, and told him that the sandwich didn’t meet Mrs. Zucker’s needs.