Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress

by Ginsberg, Debra

  My relationship with Leo heated up, fueled by the fact that he was only visiting and would shortly have to return to Colorado and take care of business there. He owned a house, he told me, and managed a restaurant besides. He also told me that he had a couple of ex-wives, both of whom he was still on good terms with. He took me out to dinner frequently and we spent several afternoons sitting by the river, drinking up the last warm days of an Indian summer. He offered to buy me a new closetful of clothes and I turned him down. He was definitely coming back for me, he said. I was too good to let go. I was precious. A rare jewel, or something similar.

  When Leo went back to Colorado, I was devastated. Despite my better intentions, I had managed to get myself entirely wrapped up in him and our little romance. I was also quite convinced that despite his protestations to the contrary, I would never see him again.

  With Belinda and Leo gone, the Dining Room quickly became unbearable. No longer a complete novice, I had become comfortable with the more exacting aspects of fine dining. Belinda had taught me well. I was able to open a bottle of wine with as much panache as she and I was even overcoming my fear of being blinded by flying champagne corks. I could balance the large trays on my shoulder with ease and I could fold napkins with the crispness of origami. However, I could never get used to the Dining Room patrons. Deane had been completely correct in his description of them. They seemed like an extremely embittered lot, despite all their money. They were very demanding, besides, and truly regarded us as if we were a somewhat lower form of life. I had many customers who never so much as looked at me when I stood at their table. Others repeated their orders to me several times, slowly and loudly, as if my brain were limited and needed the extra time to process this complicated information.

  Besides all of this (which would have been bearable if the payoff had been big enough), they were bad tippers. There was no cash in the Dining Room, since all the patrons were members of the club. At the end of the meal, the diner had only to write in the tip and sign the check. I saw some of the worst tips in my life scrawled on those checks. In fact, a standard rule of thumb was that the wealthier the guest, the lower the tip. As a final insult, all the tips were added directly to our regular wages, so the whole lot was taxed at a much higher rate. I hadn’t paid much attention to this in my early days in the Dining Room because I was busy learning what I’d said I already knew, and then I was busy creating my own kitchen drama with Leo. With that behind me, though, I began noticing that I wasn’t making very much money, after all, and I really didn’t care for the people I waited on.

  With Leo gone, too, Carol stepped up her efforts to make life miserable for me. She scheduled me for weeks of double shifts and broke up my days off so that I never had two in a row. I sensed that she was waiting for a reason to write me up, and I knew a confrontation between the two of us was inevitable. I got tired just thinking about it.

  I shared my complaints with Belinda, whom I still saw frequently. Belinda was really enjoying her new job and told me that she was making much better money than she had in the Dining Room. All I had to do was say the word, she told me, and she’d arrange an interview with her manager for me. I told her I’d think about it.

  Leo called me infrequently from Colorado. When I told him about the oppressive conditions in the Dining Room, he offered to speak to Hans on my behalf and arrange for me to interview “upstairs.” The thought of working in the club’s food and beverage office with Carol was totally repugnant. I told Leo to forget it.

  “Well, it won’t be long before you’re out of there,” he told me. “I’m coming to take you away from all of that.” He went on to tell me how we would travel around the world together, spinning a tale that I couldn’t believe but wanted to hear anyway.

  Leo showed up in the Dining Room a couple of weeks later. I was working a Fantasy, and Deane came up behind me, covered my eyes with sweaty hands, and led me into the kitchen. “Guess who’s here?” he said.

  “Hi, little girl,” Leo said, laughing. When he leaned over to embrace me, there was a smattering of applause from the chefs behind him. As for me, I had become a believer. Leo had come back for me. He might as well have ridden a white horse right into the Dining Room.

  Leo was a little more subdued than he had been a few weeks before. He had a lot of business to attend to back home, he said, and he was feeling the pressure. He was prone to migraines and had to leave the kitchen a couple of times to lie in a dark room until they subsided. He assured me that after he was finished with his job for Hans, we’d make plans to take off and start our lives together. So, although I was unhappy to see him go when he left again for Colorado, I was convinced that he would be back very soon.

  Never one to wait patiently, I wanted to call Leo and discuss our plans, but I found that the number he’d given me was disconnected. I held on for a couple of days, expecting him to call me, but my phone remained silent. I called directory assistance to find a new number for him, but they had no listing for anyone by his name. A slow, insidious panic began forming in my brain. Belinda shook her head and Deane clicked his tongue. Their advice was to forget about Leo before I discovered things I really didn’t want to know.

  After three weeks with no word from Leo, I did something I can only marvel at now. I called Hans, as if he were a buddy of mine and not my boss, and asked him if he had a working phone number for his friend Leo. It took Hans a few minutes to figure out who I was. Hadn’t Leo talked about me? I asked him. Did he know that Leo and I were seeing each other? Hans remained silent for several seconds after I delivered this information. I felt myself break out in a sweat. When Hans spoke again, it was in a tone that indicated pity, annoyance, and a mild disgust all at the same time.

  “Didn’t Leo tell you that he was married?” Hans asked me.

  “Married?” I echoed.

  “He has a baby son,” Hans went on. “Leo Jr.”

  “But he can’t have children,” I said. “He was injured in Vietnam.”

  “Leo,” Hans said patiently, “was never in Vietnam.”

  I’m still not quite sure how I managed to get through the rest of the conversation. I didn’t hear anything else Hans said until he finished by saying, “I’m sorry,” and hung up.

  The only thing that remained clear to me after my phone call to Hans was that I would no longer be able to work in the Dining Room. The humiliation alone, with everybody knowing what a fool I’d been, was reason in itself to quit immediately. I called Belinda and asked her to arrange the interview she’d offered to get me. When I told her about Leo, she was compassionate, never once telling me that she’d told me so. She did offer to try to track Leo down so that I could exact an appropriate revenge. It was tempting, I told her, but what I really wanted was to bury the whole episode and never see the inside of the Dining Room again.

  It took Belinda two weeks to set up an interview for me with her manager. During that time, I tried to keep as low a profile as possible in the Dining Room. I was sure that every time I turned my back I could hear snickering from Thelma, Agnes, and Ethel. What was almost worse were the looks of quiet pity I received from Rosemary. The cooks began treating me as if I were a recent amputee, staring at me out of the corners of their eyes but careful not to say anything that might upset me. Possibly the worst reaction, however, came from Tracy, who said he’d heard “something” about what I’d “been going through” and really wanted to help. Would I like to get together, say for drinks at my place? I told him I’d have to take a rain check.

  Carol (had she been tipped off by Hans?) started scheduling me in the Men’s Bar and the Card Room, where I made only a fraction of the already paltry tips. I had been removed from my Fantasy shifts. When I asked her about the scheduling changes,

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  Carol told me that my work performance had declined and that

  I’d have to work my way back to the Dining Room.

  I gave notice.

  My interview with Belinda’s manag
er was very brief. I fell in love with the small, busy Italian restaurant right away. The waiters and waitresses looked to be closer to my own age, and what’s more, they actually seemed to be having fun. He looked at my résumé and said, “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really need any servers right now, but Belinda’s given you a glowing recommendation. I’d have to squeeze you in on lunches to start. Would that be all right?” I hastened to tell him that it would be. “And the thing is,” he went on, “you’ll probably be able to move to dinners pretty quickly if you’re as good as Belinda says.” He looked at my résumé again and smiled.

  “You’ve got great experience,” he said.

  I never heard from Leo again. Over time, my memory of him took on the quality of an unsolved mystery. I can’t say I learned nothing from the experience. On a small scale, I realized how important it was to have a good relationship with the chef in any restaurant. This was knowledge I carried (sometimes to extremes) with me to every subsequent waitressing job. More subtly, I would never again fall for the kind of approach Leo used. Trust was not such a simple thing, after all, I thought, and the world was obviously filled with Trojan horses.

  At the very least, Leo had allowed me to throw myself headlong into the type of real-life experience I’d been waiting for since my Yellowstone days. In fact, I’d gotten so caught up in this new real world, I’d forgotten that I had come to it, in the beginning, to generate enough “authentic” suffering and wisdom to make me a better writer. Aside from several spirited journal entries, I produced hardly any writing during my months in the Dining Room. I wouldn’t realize until later that the time between experiencing an event and effectively processing it can sometimes be quite lengthy.

  I continued to see Deane after I left the Dining Room, but our visits became less and less frequent until we were meeting for coffee only once every two weeks or so. Some of the wind seemed to have been let out of his sails and he said that he missed me in the Dining Room, that things were just incredibly boring there without me. Laughing, he told me that Lisa and Tracy were expecting a baby, Rosemary had been named manager of the Card Room, and that a member had actually keeled over at the table. “See what I mean?” he said. “Nothing like what you managed to get into.” He winked at me. To his credit, he never mentioned Leo by name, even jokingly. For someone who considered almost every personal tale fair game, this probably required great restraint on his part. He, too, was becoming tired of the Dining Room politics and planned to quit.

  The last time I spoke to Deane was two years after I left the club. He had quit working altogether to stay home and nurse Bill, who had developed brain cancer. There was a deep sadness in his voice, which he tried, unsuccessfully, to cover by making his usual sarcastic quips about human nature. For several reasons, I wasn’t in a position to offer much comfort at that point. Instead, I found myself talking about how difficult my own life had recently become.

  “You’ll manage,” Deane told me then. “If there’s one thing that’s certain it’s that you’re a survivor. I can tell you that.”

  “That’s probably true of both of us, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said softly. I arranged a time to meet Deane for coffee and told him I was really looking forward to seeing him, but because of pressing obligations for both of us, the meeting never took place. This is something I’ve always regretted because, soon after, we lost touch completely.

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  Brief, intense relationships such as the ones I had with both Deane and Leo are very common in the restaurant business. The transient nature of the job itself is often to blame. Waiters and waitresses are always moving on, leaving their coworkers behind. Everything about the movement of a dining room is temporary. The landscape of a particular restaurant during a particular season is one that constantly shifts. And each night becomes a part of several different personal histories the moment it is over.

  I’ve never meant to leave behind any of the close friends I’ve made over the years, but the ones who remain today are the ones I am still working with. As for the rest, I have formed them into permanent parts of myself. Their stories, at least the ones they made with me, are now my stories.

  This, in the end, is what I do.

  [ ]

  five

  the art of waiting

  Tonight, everybody wants to sit outside on the patio. My station is inside, on the banquette, all the tables squashed close together. I’m in the middle of calculating how much money I’m not going to make when a party of five is seated at one of my tables. They’re well dressed, well seasoned, and look as if they’re in the mood to spend some money. I breathe a sigh of relief until another waitress comes up to me and says, “Don’t knock yourself out over those people.”

  “Why not?” I want to know.

  “Because they stiffed me last week,” she says. “They’re Swiss or French or something. They don’t tip.”

  “This isn’t something I needed to hear right now,” I tell her.

  “Just trying to help you,” she sniffs.

  The party is neither French nor Swiss, but they are most definitely high maintenance. In no time they have me running to all corners of the restaurant with a thousand little demands. They’ve brought promotional coupons with them and want all their appetizers for free. The manager knows them and tells me to make sure they get free desserts. He is obviously unaware of the promotional coupons. They want a bottle of white and a bottle of red.

  No, two bottles of red and a glass of white. No, just one red and two glasses of white. No, actually they’ll just have the bottle of red and a glass of Fernet Branca.

  “For me,” says the one woman who is not part of a couple. “I need it for my digestion.”

  When the entrees arrive, the single woman makes a sour face over her lasagna and says, “It really should be hotter.”

  “Have them nuke it in the microwave,” says another.

  “We don’t have a microwave,” I say. “But I’ll be happy to have them heat it up for you in the kitchen.”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” she says.

  “You don’t want it heated?”

  “No, I want it hotter, but I don’t want to wait a half hour until they make me a new one.”

  “We don’t have to make a new one, we can actually heat this one. It won’t take half an hour.”

  “I don’t want to sit here without a dinner while the rest of my friends are eating.”

  “If you’re going to complain about something,” says another, “at least let the girl fix it.”

  “It’s not a matter of having it fixed. It should have been hotter in the first place. Now by the time I get to to the end of it, it won’t be hot enough.”

  “Why don’t you let me take it? It’ll only take a minute.”

  “That’s not the point. It shouldn’t have come out this way.”

  I gaze at the woman helplessly. This is the type of situation I’ve encountered many times before at the table, but I am still unable to come up with a suitable remedy. The woman doesn’t want me to take her dish away and heat it up and she doesn’t want to let me leave it at the table. Perhaps if I offered to turn back time for her so that the lasagna could be prepared to her exact specifications (or maybe a self-heating dish would work for her), I might be able to please her. But this is obviously not

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  going to happen. Therefore, I am left with an impossible conundrum. Everybody else at the table is now watching me, waiting to see how I am going to handle it. I make a last attempt.

  “Let me run it back to the kitchen,” I say. “I’ll have them heat it quickly for you and you’ll have it back right away.”

  “No,” she says, “I’ll keep it. I’m hungry. You see, it’s the right temperature for me to eat right now, but I like to talk while I eat. It’s going to cool down too fast and then the last bit will be too cold.”

  “What would you like me to do for you, then?” I ask her.

/>   “Stay close by,” she says. “Maybe when I get to the end of it, I’ll have you heat up what’s left.”

  I have to smile and nod assent. This, I think, is what it’s all about: complicated psychological interchanges with complete strangers taking place over contracted periods of time. I sign up for this kind of dialogue every time I approach a table. I am the waitress. My job is to serve. Of course, just what makes up the definition of the word serve is not nearly as clear.

  My attitude toward service and servers changed completely with my job at Molto’s, the little Italian restaurant where Belinda worked. During my brief tenure in the Dining Room, I’d met many servers who had made their life’s work out of waiting tables. Had I been paying more attention, I probably would have noticed that most of them were quite skilled. At the time, however, I was more concerned with finding my own way through the requirements and duties of my job. I paid little heed to the art of the work itself. I found my coworkers an interesting group, and with Deane and Belinda, I’d formed strong friendships. But by the time I became involved with Leo, I’d stopped analyzing the job at all. If anything, my experience in the Dining Room had come perilously close to souring me on the concept of table service in general.

  On my very first day at Molto’s, however, I became aware of the sharp contrast in the landscapes of these two restaurants. For one thing, the staff at Molto’s was much younger, hipper, and better looking. The bartender, Anne, was a tiny blond woman with beautiful green eyes, about my own age, who had a penchant for dating wannabe rock stars. She was so small, she had to use a stool to reach some of the liquor bottles. Naturally, bar patrons usually got a prime view of her sculpted backside every time she did so. Anne made very good money. Then there was Belinda, who’d really come into her own as far as tailoring her work outfits to be as appealing as possible. No more earring or hair codes for Belinda. Charlotte, in her early thirties, was the grande dame of Molto’s. Charlotte, who taught an aerobics class during the day, had the lithe body of a dancer and a caring, almost motherly manner. When I arrived at Molto’s, she’d already been working there for five years. Then there was Grace, a flame-haired single mother in her twenties, who was very vocal about the physical attributes of the many Molto’s waiters she’d dated.