Individually, the lack of health insurance, slow winters, and the nagging feeling of going nowhere fast were manageable, even possible to ignore. Together, though, they started creating twinges of anxiety and despair. I started feeling that something had to change but felt powerless to effect or even identify that change.
Finally, on New Year’s Eve, I decided that enough was enough. I had to stop moping about my fate and take some control over it. I made a promise to myself that I would put forth my best effort to be out of the restaurant business altogether by this time next year.
By that point, I had already taken some tentative steps away from total dependence on waitressing. Using contacts I had made in the restaurant, I had begun doing some freelance writing and editing work. I unearthed the novel I’d written so long ago and started making some revisions. An attorney friend who dined in my section regularly offered me some part-time work doing billing and laying out his monthly newsletter. The irony inherent in using the restaurant to find a way out of it wasn’t lost on me.
By the middle of 1994, I was frantically busy. I was in the middle of a long assignment ghostwriting an autobiography, working part-time for my attorney friend, and still working full-time at the restaurant. Individually, the only job that would be
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able to sustain me financially was the one in the restaurant. It was impossible to let go.
Freelance work, I quickly discovered, is catch-as-catch-can— especially for someone as new to it as I was. The client who was writing his autobiography became frustrated at the slow pace of publishing and abruptly canned his project. I wasn’t having much luck generating interest in my own novel, either. And although my attorney friend was very generous, he had only limited work for me. Winter was approaching and I was back at square one.
At last, in July of 1995, somewhat later than the deadline I’d given myself, I hung up my apron forever. I tossed out all my black rubber-soled shoes and put my wine opener away in the cutlery drawer. I was finished. No more Saturday nights watching real people eat dinner while I served them. (Such was the transformation of the perceptions I’d had at twenty-two. I had gone to the table to become a real person and wound up serving that real person instead.) No more wondering whether or not I’d make my rent if it was a wet winter. I had been offered a real job with a real salary. Again the offer came through a person I’d waited on, and in this case the job was in the area of publishing. I’d hit paydirt, I thought.
My last night at the restaurant was curiously low key. In my hours of rage at the cruelty of humanity, I’d always believed I’d make a grand exit from the floor. I’d tell every annoying customer exactly how I felt and let every boneheaded manager have a piece of my mind. I might, if the circumstances were right, indulge in a fantasy common among longtime waiters and waitresses: I’d walk right out the door in the middle of a busy shift without a single word. My last night was nothing like this. Although I’d spent six and a half years in the same restaurant, nobody in management saw fit to give me any kind of send-off. My coworkers were envious. My customers were all extremely friendly and generous and some regulars wished me well and told me they would miss me. The only act of resistance I pulled was to tell my manager that I wouldn’t work the closing shift, hardly the tirade I’d imagined. When I punched out for the last time, I felt strangely deflated.
There were so many aspects of my new job that I loved. I was paid to read and evaluate manuscripts, I met published authors I admired, and I was surrounded by people whose love of literature had brought them all together. What’s more, I was building a career. Of course, when I added it up, which I tried not to do, I was actually making less than I did working half the hours in the restaurant. And I no longer had time to do any of my own writing. I took work home with me and thought about it all the time. For the first time, I enrolled Blaze in after-school day care on the days when Maya was unable to pick him up. And as for Blaze, I saw him for about three frantic hours at the end of the day before he went to bed and on weekends. Waiting tables had kept me in good physical shape. After a few months in an office, my body started looking as if it belonged to a different person— one who didn’t move very often. But despite my new sedentary lifestyle, I was exhausted most of the time. I reckoned that these were necessary sacrifices to be made in the name of going somewhere, doing something productive. What I chose not to think about was why sacrifices had to be made at all.
For all of these reasons, plus a few assorted others, I began a slow descent into deep unhappiness. This malaise was only exacerbated by the notion that somehow I had failed. Theoretically, this was supposed to be a time of great personal advancement. There was therefore no reason to be feeling so unhappy other than that of a defective character. Why else would I sit at my desk and watch the waiters walking by on their way to work
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lunch in the restaurant below the office and feel a deep sense of envy? A few hours later, I’d watch the same waiters leaving work, their pockets full of cash, the whole day and night ahead of them, free to do exactly as they pleased. “I’m so glad I’m not doing that anymore,” I’d tell myself and then force myself to believe it. I was doing something with my education, I told myself, shaping a future for myself in the world.
Occasionally, to reinforce these notions, I’d stop by Baciare for a coffee and a chat with my old coworkers. They’d mill about me, asking how I was doing, inquiring about Blaze. They asked about my new job and tried to hide their boredom when I described it. The bartender said I looked great in “civilian clothing.” The chef told me that business had been great lately. “Don’t you miss us?” he asked.
“Oh sure,” I laughed, telling myself no, no, I don’t miss it, not at all. How could I? Why would I?
I could have gone on like this indefinitely and perhaps turned into a very bitter, unfulfilled person who blamed the very work she had fought to get for her own misery. Because, in the end, there were no sparkling revelations. I had lost my ability to see the forest for the trees. Ultimately, it was Blaze who came to my (and his own) rescue.
While I had spent the previous months preoccupied with myself and my work, Blaze had entered his own drift into unhappiness and away from me. He had been having problems at school, both socially and academically, and had reacted by retreating further and further into a little world he was building around himself. It had been easy to whitewash over his difficulties; I never saw his teachers and I certainly didn’t have time to observe him in class. It was a rough patch, I assumed. He’d done well enough the year before and he was bound to snap out of it. But one afternoon, as I sat at my desk pondering my future, Blaze simply took off from school instead of heading over to the child care center to wait for Maya to pick him up. Although an alert child care worker had spotted him and reeled him in before anything tragic happened, I got the fright of my life. My son himself had very little in the way of explanation for his actions. While he was unable to verbalize it, though, his message was quite clear: I was not paying attention, and he needed much more of my time than I’d been giving him.
I was lucky to have my priorities so carefully and completely delineated for me in this way. Blaze was still quite young and I hadn’t been “away” for long enough to lose touch entirely with what was going on in his world. In a way, though, the luckiest part of the whole debacle was that I realized, once more, that the one unequivocal responsibility I had was to my child. I didn’t always know if the decisions I made were the right ones, nor could I predict the future. I did know, however, that nobody could do it for me. I had to be there. I wanted to be there. This time around, there was no sacrifice at all. The decision to quit my job, therefore, was easy. The actual quitting was not quite as smooth.
My boss understood my need to spend more time with Blaze. She didn’t understand why I had to leave her employ to do so. What was I going to do? she wanted to know. Where would I work? When I told her that I would probably go back to waiting on tables
(I’d only met her in the first place because I’d served her lunch years before), she was horrified. I was so talented, she maintained. Did I want to spend the rest of my life as a waitress? What a waste.
This was nothing I hadn’t thought myself many times before. This time, however, my feelings about it were much different. Waiting on tables would not be an indication of failure. Rather, it would be a way to avoid failing at the most important task I had. I couldn’t afford to take time off from raising Blaze. There would be no second chances here. If I screwed it up, there would be no way of going back to “fix” it later. I had known this when Blaze
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was just an infant, but somehow I’d managed to let it slip right out of sight.
My wine opener came back out of the cutlery drawer. I went shopping for sturdy shoes. In short order, I got myself a job at another Italian restaurant. On my first shift, I cleared a hundred dollars in four hours. I was back.
It took leaving the restaurant business to realize how much free time I’d had while I was in it. If nothing else, my time away had taught me how to utilize those hours effectively. Because the actual time spent working outside my house was so abbreviated now, I was able to volunteer at Blaze’s school every day. I was able to witness firsthand what was really happening inside his classroom and directly address the problems he was having. Blaze, for one, was very happy about the change and seemed nothing less than incredibly relieved that I was spending so much time with him. Ultimately, I spent so much time at the school over the next year that the director of special education offered me a paying job as a special education aide.
Despite the full-time waiting job and volunteer time at the school, however, I still had time to write. In fact, I began to write more than I ever had before. Several freelance jobs came my way, nicely supplementing my income. I finally retired my dead horse of a novel and wrote another. When I finished that one, I started a third. Now, when I went to work at the restaurant, I saw it as a break from the “real” work I was doing at home. As a bonus, I returned home with a handful of cash. Finally, it seemed, I was doing not only what I should be doing, but what I wanted to do.
But before I drift too far into a warm fuzzy wallow here, let me interject that waiting still held the same frustrations and minor annoyances as before. It was still a challenge to deal with rude customers and uncaring managers. It was still easy to lapse into negativity after a series of trying tables and poor tips. And, perhaps more than ever, I felt my age. Previously, I’d been either the same age or younger than my coworkers. Now, in my mid-thirties, I was a senior member on the floor. Most of my managers were younger than I and boasted fewer years inside a restaurant. I still had many nights when I could see the dawning of the new millennium and feel depressed at the thought that I might be serving champagne to partygoers at the end of the twentieth century. And what would happen, I thought, if my writing (which was now on the front burner, right next to Blaze) never translated into a living? How likely would it be that I’d be able to find a job other than waitressing at forty? Forty-five?
These questions surfaced, panicked me for an hour or two, and receded several times a week. But if nothing else, my year away from the restaurant had given me the ability to focus on the tasks at hand and avoid spinning out into a future I had much less control over. I realized, too, that it’s not always necessary to know how things are going to turn out. And perhaps the most valuable lesson I’d learned was that the act of waiting itself is an active one. That period of time between the anticipation and the beginning of life’s events is when everything really happens—the time when actual living occurs. I’d spent so much time worrying about the outcome of my life that I’d forgotten how to live it. I’d also come to know that not everything was fraught with a vast and complicated meaning. Sometimes it was only about timing the order just right, recommending a particularly good dessert, or making a friend out of a stranger at my table. I began to see not only the simplicity of these acts but also their beauty.
They say that good things come to those who wait. Finally, after almost two decades of waiting, I had arrived at a real understanding of that aphorism.
Call me a late bloomer.
[ ]
epilogue
I’m one of those people who always wants to know what happens in the end. It’s difficult for me to read a book (particularly a good one) without flipping to the last page and sneaking a peek. I find it difficult to wait for the end even when the read is compelling. And then, when it’s over, I want to know what happened after that. Of course, one of the main ironies of waiting, in all of its senses, is that, if you are a “waiter” (as in, one who waits), you can never really know what happens in the very end. After all, you will always find something else to be waiting for, some other end to reach or conclusion to draw. Even if the world explodes on the last page, there is always the possibility that something can happen to start everything going all over again.
So I find it particularly ironic that I am now in the unique position of skipping beyond the covers of Waiting and writing my own ending. Although there’s a curious sense of finality in the act of writing this epilogue, it also seems quite fitting. Waiting certainly marked the end of a long life phase for me while linking it to the beginning of another. But before I investigate what looms over the next horizon, let me back up for a moment and go to the beginning of this particular end: what happened after Waiting.
When I began writing Waiting, I had several very different jobs. I was working as an instructional aide in a preschool program for severely handicapped children during the day and I was waiting on tables a couple of nights a week. My freelance editing business was operating in fits and starts as well. I’d have a month or two with no work and then be deluged with deadlines. And of course there was my son, Blaze, a full-time job in himself, but a rewarding one. As usual, my waitressing job proved to be the most lucrative, even with an abbreviated schedule at the restaurant.
I got some characteristically amusing reactions when I informed my restaurant coworkers that I was writing a book about the job and that it was going to be published. The chef, for example, responded this way:
“What do you mean, book? You are writing a book about what?”
“About this,” I said, making a sweeping gesture across the restaurant. “About this job. About my life as a waitress.”
“What?” the chef asked again. “Are you serious?” He smiled and wiped the edge of a splattered plate with a kitchen rag. “You are kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding,” I told him and took my order from the line. The chef paused for a beat or two and scratched his head.
“What are you going to say about me?” he asked and smiled again.
After expressing a similar sense of disbelief, my fellow waiter Franco said, “I want my cut, eh?”
“What cut?” I asked him. “Why should you get a cut of anything?”
“You write about me, no? I want my cut.”
“Please,” I said, shoving him aside so that I could put an order into the computer, “why would I want to write about you?”
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“Eh? Come on, look at me.” He grinned broadly, revealing a mouth full of nicotine-stained teeth, and straightened his raggedy tie in a mock gesture of vanity.
“My point, exactly,” I said.
My managers were somewhat nonplussed with the idea that I was writing a book. They wavered between mild paranoia about what I might say and befuddled amusement that anyone would be interested enough about restaurant life to publish a book about it. (Of course, none of my managers actually read books so this wasn’t an entirely surprising reaction. In fact, several of them were barely literate in both Italian and English, which explained the inadvertently hilarious items on the “nightly specials” sheet. We often had “pork lion,” for example, and “veal lever.” My personal favorites, however, were the “stripped sea bass” and “ravioli staffed with salmon.”)
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll have plenty more of these before that happens.”
My fellow servers were rather more excited about the book and began offering me all kinds of information about their past experiences on an almost hourly basis. There were some doozies in these tales. One server once had a manager who’d set himself on fire in the middle of the dining room. Another had waited on a party whose host hurled curses at the server for twenty minutes until another member of the group politely pointed out that the host had Tourette’s syndrome. Still another server had waited on an elderly, querulous Beverly Hills matron who had passed out at the table. Since she was out cold when the paramedics loaded her onto a stretcher, they asked the server if he knew about how old the woman was. “In her seventies,” I think, the server said, at which point the woman shot up from the stretcher and shouted, “Excuse me! I am sixty-five and don’t you forget it!”
Although I loved all of these stories, I knew I would never be able to write about them. I knew that I was not an objective expert on restaurants, servers, or waiting, but after twenty years in the business, I was certainly an expert on my own experiences with all of the above. And it was only my own experiences that I could write about with any kind of authenticity. Somewhere in there, I hoped, I would strike a common chord.
Shortly thereafter, I started becoming overwhelmed with memories of the previous two decades every time I went to work at the restaurant. Since I couldn’t really think about waitressing while I worked at the school or while I edited manuscripts, my waiting shifts became, in a sense, writing shifts. I found myself jotting down notes when I should have been folding napkins and drifting into reveries about my first experiences at the table when I was actually at the table of a patron who wanted service now and not twenty years ago. I was preoccupied and for good reason. There weren’t actually enough hours in my day to keep all my jobs, spend time with my son, and complete the book I’d been waiting so long to write.
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