In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (65 page)

At the fourth hotel the children’s waiter was a dedicated womanizer. A flirtatious guest held out on him longer than usual, and one morning I saw this waiter urinate into a glass of orange juice, then serve it to the woman’s child with the crooning injunction to drink it all up because it was so-o-o good.

At the fifth hotel I served a woman who was all bosom from neck to knee, tiny feet daintily shod, smooth plump hands beautifully manicured, childish eyes in a painted face. When I brought her exactly-three-minute eggs to the table she said to me, “Open them for me, dear. The shells burn my hands.” I turned away, to the station table against the wall, to perform in appropriate secrecy a task that told me for the first but certainly not the last time that here I was only an extension of my function. It was the Catskills, not early socialist teachings at my father’s knee, that made me a Marxist.

One winter I worked weekends and Christmas at a famous hotel. This hotel had an enormous tiered dining room and was run by one of the most feared headwaiters in the mountains. The system here was that all newcomers began at the back of the dining room on the tier farthest from the kitchen. If your work met with favor you were moved steadily toward the center, closer to the kitchen doors and to the largest tips which came not from the singles who were invariably placed in the back of the room but from the middle-aged manufacturers, club owners, and gangsters who occupied the tables in the central tiers, cutting a wide swath as though across a huge belly between the upper and lower ends of the dining room.

As the autumn wore on I advanced down the tiers. By Christmas I was nearly in the center of the room, at one of the best stations in the house. This meant my guests were now middle-aged married couples whose general appearance was characterized by blond bouffants, mink stoles, midnight-blue suits, and half-smoked cigars. These people ate prodigiously and tipped well.

That Christmas the hotel was packed and we worked twelve hours a day. The meals went on forever. By the end of the week we were dead on our feet but still running. On New Year’s Eve at midnight we were to serve a full meal, the fourth of the day, but this was to be a banquet dinner—that is, a series of house-chosen dishes simply hauled out, course by course—and we looked forward to it. It signaled the end of the holiday. The next morning the guests checked out and that night we’d all be home in our Bronx or Brooklyn apartments, our hard-earned cash piled on the kitchen table.

But a threatening atmosphere prevailed at that midnight meal from the moment the dining room doors were flung open. I remember sky blue sequined dresses and tight mouths, satin cummerbunds and hard-edged laughter, a lot of drunks on the vomitous verge. People darted everywhere and all at once, pushing to get at the central tables (no assigned seats tonight), as though, driven from one failed part of the evening to another here, at last, they were going to get what
should
come through for them; a good table in the famous dining room during its New Year’s Eve meal.

The kitchen was instantly affected: it picked up on atmosphere like an animal whose only survival equipment is hyperalertness. A kind of panicky aggression seemed to overtake the entire staff. The orderly lines that had begun to form for the first appetizer broke almost immediately. People who had grown friendly, working together over these long winter weekends, now climbed over each other’s backs to break into the line and grab at the small round dishes piled up on the huge steel tables.

I made my first trip into the kitchen, took in the scene before me, and froze. Then I took a deep breath, inserted myself into a line, held my own against hands and elbows pushing into my back and ribs, and got my tray loaded and myself out the kitchen doors. I served the fruit cup quickly and, depending on my busboy to get the empties off the tables in time, made my anxious way back into the kitchen for the next course which, I’ll not forget as long as I live, was chow mein. This time I thought violence was about to break out. All those people, trays, curses being flung about! And now I couldn’t seem to take a deep breath: I remained motionless just inside the kitchen doors. Another waitress, a classmate from City College, grabbed my arm and whispered in my ear, “Skip the chow mein, they’ll never know the difference. Go on to the next course, there’s nobody on the line over there.” My heart lifted, the darkness receded. I stared at her. Did we dare? Yes, she nodded grimly, and walked away. It didn’t occur to either of us to consider that she, as it happened, had only drunken singles at her tables who of course wouldn’t know the difference, but I had married couples who wanted everything that was coming to them.

I made my first mistake. I followed my classmate to the table with no line in front of it, loaded up on the cold fish, and fought my way out the nearest kitchen door. Rapidly, I dealt out the little dishes to the men and women at my tables. When I had finished and was moving back to my station table and its now empty tray, a set of long red fingernails plucked at my upper arm. I looked down at a woman with coarse blond hair, blue eyelids surrounded by lines so deep they seemed carved, and a thin red mouth. “We didn’t get the chow mein,” she said to me.

My second mistake. “Chow mein?” I said. “What chow mein?” Still holding me, she pointed to the next table where chow mein was being finished and the cold fish just beginning to be served. I looked at her. Words would not come. I broke loose, grabbed my tray, and dived into the kitchen.

I must have known I was in trouble because I let myself be kicked about in the kitchen madness, wasting all sorts of time being climbed over before I got the next dish loaded onto my tray and inched myself, crablike, through the swinging doors. As I approached my station I saw, standing beside the blond woman, the headwaiter, chewing a dead cigar and staring glumly in my direction. He beckoned me with one raised index finger.

I lowered my tray onto the station table and walked over to him. “Where’s the chow mein?” he asked quietly, jerking his thumb back at my tables, across the head of the woman whose blue-lidded eyes never left his face. Her mouth was a slash of narrow red. Despair made me simple.

“I couldn’t get to it.” I said. “The kitchen is a madhouse. The line was impossible.”

The headwaiter dropped his lower lip. His black eyes flickered into dangerous life and his hand came up slowly to remove the cigar stub from between his teeth. “You couldn’t
get
to it?” he said. “Did I hear you right? You said you couldn’t get to it?” A few people at neighboring tables looked up.

“That’s right,” I said miserably.

And then he was yelling at me, “And you call yourself a waitress?”

A dozen heads swung around. The headwaiter quickly shut his mouth. He stared coldly at me, in his eyes the most extraordinary mixture of anger, excitement, and fear. Yes, fear. Frightened as I was, I saw that he too was afraid. Afraid of the blond woman who sat in her chair like a queen with the power of life and death in her, watching a minister do her awful bidding. His eyes kept darting toward her, as though to ask, All right? Enough? Will this do?

No, the unyielding face answered. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

“You’re fired,” the headwaiter said to me. “Serve your morning meal and clear out.”

The blood seemed to leave my body in a single rush. For a moment I thought I was going to faint. Then I realized that tomorrow morning my regular guests would be back in these seats, most of them leaving after breakfast, and I, of course, would receive my full tips exactly as though none of this had happened. The headwaiter was not really punishing me. He knew it, and now I knew it. Only the blond woman didn’t know it. She required my dismissal for the appeasement of her lousy life—her lined face, her hated husband, her disappointed New Year’s Eve—and he, the headwaiter, was required to deliver it up to her.

For the first time I understood something about power. I stared into the degraded face of the headwaiter and saw that he was as trapped as I, caught up in a working life that required
someone’s
humiliation at all times.

Bungalow

Elizabeth Ehrlich

“C
ome for the weekend. Come up with the children on Friday, early. Come right in the morning,” said Miriam’s voice. The line crackled with country static. “You won’t have to move a finger, you can just rest with the children.”

I said something vague, and said good-bye. I hung up the phone, gripped by useless emotions. It was unfair of me, this I know now, but denial was what I heard in her voice, denial or wistfulness—for a different sort of daughter-in-law, one with perfect nails and a house to match. A daughter-in-law who didn’t work, who could spend a whole Friday, indeed a whole summer in Miriam’s bungalow, watching the Catskill days drift by with her pretty children and their eager grandmother, while the husband, the
fardiner
, the breadwinner, came up for weekends. A daughter-in-law with time to spend, who was organized and careful with objects and money, who never would have lost a gold necklace, say. An old, long, gold necklace given her by Miriam.

Instead, she got me, a mad circus juggler keeping too many plates aloft, while which ones were crashing I did not know. I went to work; my nails were dull and ragged; money slipped through my hands. I did not even remember the necklace. And to whom could Miriam complain?

Friday would be a regular work day. I would greet the sitter, zip my heart into the closet, kiss the round faces of two small children, and close the apartment door. I would descend eleven flights on the elevator, disappear into the subway under a blazing morning sun, tunnel south under fifty blocks of pavement. Emerging from the depths, I would buy a cup of hot brown coffee, ascend fifty flights on the elevator to my office, and enter a world of printers and telephones, copiers and metal desks, important meetings, artificial light, fluorescent buzz and hum. Nine hours later, if I were lucky, I would reverse the course and meet my children after their day in a parallel universe under the open sky.

This was the frank reality of my life, and I wished it to be acknowledged, perhaps praised, by Miriam. Praised? All day long to leave two
kinderlekh
of that quality? a
meydele
, a
yingele
, a little girl and boy like this?

“Come early, and rest,” urged Miriam. There was infinite generosity in this, the door was open. But you need ears to hear.

The next day, Friday, New York was melting: 90 degrees already, reported my clock radio, broadcasting into my uneasy, guilty sleep. The apartment, smelling faintly of kitchen refuse, surely was hotter still. On reflection, everything seemed possible, even a day off work.

So I called, and I packed, and I double-parked the car in front of the building.

Into the elevator I schlepped suitcases and strollers, swimming pool floats, sun hats, sun lotion, insect repellent, extra sweaters, juice cups, portable crib,
Goodnight Moon
, Fluffy Bear, Mr. Turtle, Baby Pillow, Octopus, and Duck. Outside in the brothlike air, I packed the car, I got the children in, I wiped up a juice spill. I set off with a credit card and seven dollars in my pocket. Logistics being as they were, I could not think of a way to stop at the bank. I would have to borrow from Miriam.

Out of town Friday morning! Henry Hudson Parkway, George Washington Bridge, the Palisades—and since the old, borrowed car had no air conditioning, the wind was in our hair. I raised and lowered windows, trying for balance between temperature and noise. I sang! I called attention to birds and trees!

Bear Mountain approached, and the children were asleep. Juice cups fell from their limp, sticky hands. There would be no afternoon nap now, no breather for me at all….

Shah
, let them sleep, I imagined Miriam to say….

I found highways and exits; I found myself enjoying the green view, the subdued breathing of two little ones. The office could wait. The best and most important job in the world seemed less important. It blew away. My mind wandered, perhaps too much. In general, I have always been lucky to get where I get in one piece.

The last leg of the trip is a long crooked back road littered with the history of the lower Catskills: nineteenth-century farmhouse close to the road, empty; abandoned chicken coops, trailer homes, economic depression, soap suds spewing into mountain tributaries, a Ukrainian resort, a drug treatment village, rabbits for sale, fishing boats to rent, a summer camp for girls.