Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (11 page)

As we headed to Massachusetts and Ray began his transfor
mation into the role of prodigal son, I was sure of almost noth
ing. I didn’t know then that I would find his family pleasant but extremely strange. Nor did I have the foresight to predict that within days I would become so suddenly homesick and fearful of becoming beholden to this family that I would take the last of my money and board yet another bus back to Portland. I couldn’t know that I would spend five days on this bus, during which I would have plenty of time to consider the mistakes I had made in the previous weeks and weigh the damages against the rewards.

I did, however, come to a realization that had been building since I first set foot in the Yellowstone kitchen. I felt that at twenty years old, I still knew nothing and had experienced very little of what I considered real life. I hadn’t been able to rely on myself long enough to stick out my job at Yellowstone. I saw my
inability to turn the experience into a successful adventure as something of a failure. Therefore, I reckoned,
I
was something of a failure. It was a difficult conclusion to come to at an age when the state of one’s self is usually of paramount importance. Now more than ever, it seemed, my future consisted of a series of tales waiting to be told. And as was usual for me, I was in a ter
rific hurry to get on with it. Certainly one of the supreme ironies in my life has been my lack of patience. And although I didn’t fully understand it at the time, learning to wait gracefully was a lesson that, for me, had only just begun.

[ ]

four

working the fantas
y

There are many questions
I am able to answer with ease. “What do you recommend this evening?” for example, or “Which one of your chardonnays is the most buttery?” (as if even 1 per
cent of those asking know what
buttery
means in any context other than toast). I can even come up with quick responses to other, more complicated questions such as “What is the mean
ing of life?” (which is what customers
always
say when I ask them if they have any questions and neglect to add “about the menu”). There is one question, however, that still gives me trouble: “What do you do?”

Sometimes this question is asked by a customer who follows it with “I mean, when you’re not here,” as if serving them is not really “doing” anything. Strangely enough, most of the waiters and waitresses I’ve worked with share this point of view. Most of them feel that it’s not quite socially acceptable to say “I’m a waiter.” Usu
ally the response is more like “Well, I’m an actor/artist/model/ teacher/musician....” They never seem able to admit that wait
ing is actually their
profession
. It’s a temporary living at best.

In my experience, those who have never waited tables some
times express a strange sort of fascination when I tell them that
I work in a restaurant. Comments have ranged from “I’ll bet you meet lots of rich single men doing that” to “How can you stand to have people order you around?” It’s not that much of a stretch to assume that this job isn’t considered one to aspire to.

Perhaps this is why “a real job” is commonly accepted restaurant slang for anything other than waiting tables.

I have fallen prey to the same sort of social shiftiness in my career as a waitress. When I enrolled my son in school for the first time, for example, I was required to fill out an emergency information card that asked for my occupation. I debated long before I finally admitted to being a “food server.” I was con
vinced that my son’s teachers would have a rather low opinion of a single mother who worked as a waitress, especially since his school district was rather a tony one. I was actually waiting on most of the parents of his peers on a regular basis.

Lately, though, I’ve been able to get around this quandary. These days, although it’s still the most profitable, waitressing is just one of many jobs I hold. Others include reviewing books for my local newspaper, freelance editing, and working in a special program for preschool-age children. In conversation, I usually list these others as what I “do” and then add “and I also work in a restaurant.” My hope is that by the time I get to the end of this list, whoever I’m talking to will be so dazzled by the myriad of other more socially acceptable jobs I have that they won’t even notice the waitressing angle.

On the other hand, I sometimes throw the waitressing out first just to see what kind of reaction I get. After twenty years serving the public, I’ve developed a sixth sense about the social standards of various people. I know that some of the people I encounter in my neighborhood, through my son’s school, or even wait on consider restaurant work low class—something that immediately places me in a different social stratum. On the flip side, there are people who automatically feel more comfort
able with me as one of the working class when they learn that I’m a waitress. My years of waiting tables are solely responsible for my ability to tell who is who.

Aside from the social repercussions, there are several rea
sons why table service isn’t uppermost on the list of desirable prospective jobs. For one, there are rarely medical or retirement benefits. For another, it gets more difficult to cope with the physical demands of the job after a certain number of years. And depending on the restaurant, there is always the chance you will be replaced by a younger, firmer version of yourself. There is no possibility of advancement, either, unless one is trying to get into management (and few restaurant managers make more than waiters in good restaurants). For all these reasons, waiters and waitresses are primarily a transient bunch, and in my experience I’ve found that with few exceptions they are not only waiting on tables but waiting to get out of the business. They are putting themselves through school or making a few extra bucks on the side. They are in the arts or trying to open their own businesses. Occasionally, they are waiting to be “discovered.” Even the elite few who do consider themselves professional waiters or wait
resses (called “lifers” in the business) usually have something else on the side that they’re waiting for, such as the dream of opening their own restaurant.

Although I’d waited tables at Maxman’s, worked at Yellow
stone, and even made a few sandwiches in the campus coffee shop, I didn’t begin what I considered an adult version of this waiting game until after I graduated from college. My sense of accomplishment at having attained a diploma was tempered by the knowledge that I would shortly have to start paying off four years of student loans and the sneaking suspicion that, after what I considered a grueling term of study, I had very little in the way of marketable skills. Somehow, I couldn’t see that my degree was going to open any doors I’d care to walk through.

I should explain.

I had graduated with a B.A. in English literature, one of those majors that, in my mind, guaranteed that I could either hold my own at a cocktail party or go on to graduate school. Most of my classmates were going the latter route, having considered them
selves pre-law, pre-med, or pre-education. For me, a life of acade
mia was never in the cards. I’d always thought of my college education as being pre–real life. Over the course of four years, I’d been able to cover my tuition with a complicated combination of scholarships, grants, and loans. Nevertheless, I had been com
pletely responsible for my own upkeep throughout and took full advantage of every work-study program that was thrown my way. Almost all of my classmates came from families that could afford to send their kids to this exclusive and pricey college. Yet, for whatever reason, most of my peers attempted to disguise the fact that they were covered financially if for some reason they couldn’t scrape enough money together to buy books one semester or pur
chase new skis or throw a party with five kegs of beer. This was an attitude that bothered me in a subtle but insistent way. It seemed to me inherently dishonest and a little spoiled. The thought of racking up more loans and spending more years in this type of rarefied atmosphere was a bit repugnant.

Besides all of this, I had just finished writing my first novel. As far as I was concerned, I was officially a writer. Not only was I sure of this, but I wanted to write what
I
wanted to write—an attitude that had already caused some consternation among my professors. Being a writer came with certain responsibilities, to my mind. For one, I was under the impression (in an only vaguely conscious way) that suffering was a key element in the development of a decent writer. I figured I wasn’t going to expe
rience any true suffering (at least the kind I considered valuable) in graduate school. Nor, I figured, was I going to find it in an office job, which seemed like the logical next step.

I had spent the previous two months working for a tempo
rary agency, moving from one office to another, and I considered the life of an office drone a fate worse than death. My days were spent crossing and uncrossing my legs, digging papers out of files, calling strangers on the phone who didn’t want to speak to me, waiting for lunch breaks, coffee breaks, any break from the stifling routine. And the office gossip was the most deadening of all: petty sniping, humorless jokes, and grade school–style flirta
tions. I was offered a couple of permanent positions at entry-level wages, but I ran from them as fast as I could. My plan was to get lucky and sell my novel. At some point, I would be discov
ered for the big talent I knew I was. In the meantime, I had to have heat, electricity, and a phone (there were limits to the amount of suffering I felt I needed). To finance this life I’d designed for myself, I would most certainly have to work some
where.

Waitressing still had the same glitzy appeal for me then as it had when I was sixteen. Only this time I wasn’t going to settle for a coffee shop or a Petit Morsel. I would go for the big time, I reckoned, and make a lot of money.

There were other considerations as well. I wanted to meet people who were living real lives. Up to that point in time, I’d always felt like an observer of my own life. It was as if I were just moving my piece around a game board. The outcome had already been determined and I was just watching—and wait-ing—to see how it turned out. Waiting tables was a way to become part of what I’d always seen as the outside world. And, of course, it would only be temporary.

With all of this in mind, I put my diploma away and applied for a job I saw advertised in the paper. The Dining Room of a Prestigious Club, the ad said, needed Waitresses with at least Two Years of Fine Dining Experience. I felt absolutely no qualms bluffing about my experience. None of the restaurants I had
worked in could be remotely considered fine dining. But I had a college degree, after all. I figured I didn’t have to know brain surgery to open a bottle of wine (and, actually, one
doesn’t
have to know brain surgery to open a bottle of wine, but, as I soon learned, one really does have to know how to open a bottle of wine in order to get that cork out with anything resembling grace).

I was called in for an interview with Carol, the overbearing matriarch who ran the Dining Room. I could tell immediately that Carol hated me on sight. Moreover, I suspected she knew that my résumé was mostly fakery. Nevertheless, she brought the food and beverage manager over to complete the interview. The F and B man was Hans, a strange Swiss import, brought in recently (I later found out) to improve the Dining Room’s bot
tom line. Hans interviewed my breasts, apparently finding them quite qualified. I was hired.

I had the great good fortune to be assigned to a waiter named Deane on my first training shift. Although Deane was less than pleased to have a new waitress follow him around (almost every waiter hates training new hires, as it is nearly impossible to maintain the type of internal rhythm necessary to get through a shift when you have to stop and explain everything to another person who is usually hanging about like a spare part), he was happy to provide me with a quick dossier on every
one on the waitstaff. There was a group of older waitresses, he told me, who had been working at the club for years and had a steady stream of regulars. These women would never accept me, Deane went on, as they were generally unwilling to deal with any kind of change in the landscape of their work. They had names from another era (Thelma, Agnes, Ethel) and hairstyles to match. Most of them worked breakfast and lunch, Deane told me, but a few held the coveted dinner shifts, which were very difficult to get. (In any restaurant, dinners are the money shifts,
with Friday and Saturday nights being the best among them. Waiters who are unable or unwilling to move from lunches—the purgatorial training shifts—to dinners are considered inept or simply insane.)