Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (10 page)

This may all seem self-explanatory or, possibly, irrelevant to the average diner. But consider the following scenario. You arrive in a restaurant and are seated immediately. Right next to the rest room. Your waitress arrives at the table promptly to take your drink order, but you wait an interminable time for your bread and water. Your salads arrive quickly, but you grow old waiting for your entrees, which, when they arrive, are only lukewarm. You complain to a manager you see walking by your table and he apologizes profusely. Your waitress is replaced by a waiter who brings a you a free dessert but seems harried and overburdened. Your dining experience is ultimately not a good one. Here are some of the possible reasons why.

The hostess who seated you is saving a better table for a guest who has already slipped her a twenty-dollar bill for the privilege. Your waitress is at odds with her busboy, who feels she stiffed him the last time they worked together, so he’s not bend
ing over backward to help any of her tables. Stressed out by this fact, your waitress complains in the kitchen that everything takes too long. The chef responds by holding up her tickets or
neglecting to tell her when her food is ready. The manager hears your complaints and fears you’ll never be back to sink more money into the restaurant, so he removes the offensive waitress from your table and substitutes a waiter who already has too many tables because he kicked back to the hostess earlier and she’s seated his entire section with parties of six. This waiter can’t be bothered with you and your free dessert. In fact, the manager has told him how unhappy you are and he’s
sure
you won’t be tipping well.

The structure has slipped. The network has become unbal
anced. Everybody suffers.

Despite my intentions to make the best of it, I hated everything about Yellowstone. My work in the pantry could only be described as drudgery. I worked from 5
A
.
M
. until 2
P
.
M
. five days a week and loathed every minute of it, shrimp and all. As waiters and waitresses dropped out (the high attrition rate was some
thing the orientation packet didn’t mention), I learned that I could move “up” and join their ranks, but I opted to stay in my designated area. If possible, the waitstaff was even more miser
able than I was. What’s more, since they didn’t exactly rake in the cash, they were worse off financially.

I was moved out of the kitchen occasionally to serve break
fast from behind a hot buffet. One Sunday morning, I watched a large group of foreign tourists file into the dining room with cameras. Before they brought their plates up to be served, they all stood and took several photos of me and my pantry mate as we stood behind steaming trays of hash browns and scrambled eggs. My pantry mate turned to me as the flashbulbs snapped and shook her head in disbelief. “Oh. My. God,” she said.

“Oh, honey,” a waitress said, walking by, “this happens all the time in here.”

Aside from Susie, whom I rarely saw, I made no friends. Despite the fact that Yellowstone was the ultimate melting pot, employing people from every state in the union, it seemed like a sociology experiment gone horribly wrong. Employees formed into cliques, seeking out others from their home state. A class structure in miniature appeared within weeks of the summer season, based on geographic region, race, and level of education. There was absolutely no sense of commonality aside from the fact that nobody seemed to be having a good time.

I called home whenever possible and complained bitterly. My parents were unsympathetic. Stick it out, they told me. I had several long conversations with Ray, who was now looking a lot better than he had a few weeks earlier. In fact, I was starting to wonder what had possessed me to leave him in the first place. After smugly reminding me that he knew I was too soft to make it at Yellowstone, he told me that he was planning to drive from Oregon to Massachusetts, where his parents lived, and he’d be happy to come pick me up along the way. I was very tempted and began weighing my options.

To pass the time when I wasn’t working, I did what every
body else did to fill the hours—I drank. Because of the altitude, it was easy to get drunk with very little effort, so I drank silly cocktails such as Amaretto Sours and, since I was so often hun
gry, lingered over the garnish. To balance my lack of machismo, I bought a cowboy hat and wore it into the hotel bar. Most of the time, I sat at the bar by myself and talked to whatever bartender happened to be on shift. Sometimes, though, I just sat and watched the tourists, who seemed to have come from points other than Earth.

Any notion I might have had of visiting anywhere as a tourist perished at Yellowstone. As if big Hawaiian shirts com
bined with cowboy hats weren’t bad enough, visitors felt com
pelled to call attention to themselves in an astonishing variety of
ways. Like employees, guests were cautioned to respect the free-roaming wildlife around the park. Respect, however, was last on the list of some of the idiots I saw. I watched with horror one day as a woman actually kicked a bison to get it to stand up and fit into a photo her husband was taking. Still another tourist crammed his camera into the face of a moose who, it turned out, was guarding her young. Extremely unhappy with the intrusion, the moose charged the tourist right out of the village. In the din
ing room, waiters regularly got requests for elk burgers or bison steak.

“Doncha have any of that? What kind of a place is this?”

“Oh, mama,” one waitress sang, “don’t let yer babies grow up to be tourists . . . ”

During my tenure there, I left the confines of Lakeshore exactly twice. Once was to go to dinner with Susie and her politician fiancé, who had flown in from Washington, D.C., to make sure she was all right. Susie insisted that I come with the two of them to a restaurant he claimed was “the best in Mon
tana.” Thus, we drove for hours in his rented car to Pray, Mon
tana (a town so named for the plethora of clasped hands adorning just about everything), and ate chocolate-covered strawberries in a chalet-style restaurant with tuxedo service. We were literally blinded by a furious blizzard on the way back to the park. It was early June.

“What kind of godforsaken wilderness is this, anyway?” Susie’s fiancé demanded.

“I didn’t ask you to come here,” Susie snapped.

“I wouldn’t have had to come here if you hadn’t run away,” he retorted, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

The two of them then commenced arguing about their relation
ship while I pictured myself as a statistic. Summer kill, perhaps.

The second outing came after I’d more or less made up my mind to leave Yellowstone as soon as possible. I decided I needed
to take at least one hike through the wilderness, since it was cer
tainly the last time I’d ever have the opportunity. One of my pantry mates and I, along with her roommate and a guy who was looking to be anybody’s boyfriend, set out on what was supposed to be a day hike through some of the prettiest country in the park. Like everything else at Yellowstone, the hike turned into the type of disaster one usually refers to later as “a learning experience.” The boyfriend wannabe had decided to take control of our direc
tion, stating that he was an experienced hiker and, well, a man, after all. Foolishly, we let him lead us way off our designated course. On the way to nowhere, we passed yet another boneyard. This time I knelt down and touched a skull on the ground.

“Can you tell what animal this comes from?” I asked Boy
friend, who examined it carefully.

“It seems to have the specific markings of a Lakeshore kitchen worker,” he said, deadpan.

Bones soon gave way to animal prints in the earth.

“Do you think these are fresh?” my pantry mate asked tenta
tively. As we looked at each other, trying to decide whether the droppings we were standing in came from bears or bison, a pow
erful thunderstorm broke over our heads. As rain pelted down on us we realized that our metal-frame packs were the highest points around. If we managed to escape the bears, Boyfriend pointed out, we would most likely be electrocuted. The four of us then squeezed into a two-man tent and proceeded to drink the three bottles of wine that my pantry mate had the foresight to bring, reckoning that if we were going to perish in the wilder
ness, we were going down with smiles on our faces. In the tent, Boyfriend got assigned to me by default as my pantry mate and her roommate soon started making out with each other on their twelve inches of space. Shrugging at fate and giggling hopelessly after the last wine bottle was emptied, Boyfriend and I fell asleep wrapped in a damp embrace.

The next morning, still alive but extremely hung over, we became hopelessly lost hiking out and managed to walk an extra fifteen miles through bear country before we reached the main road at sunset. All four of us bent down and kissed the macadam.

Ray arrived in Yellowstone three days later, in the middle of the night. I worked my scheduled shift until 2
P
.
M
. the next day and then walked into the office. A woman behind a gray metal desk looked up from a stack of ancient-looking files and exhaled a lungful of menthol cigarette smoke in my direction. She was wearing a cowboy hat. The plastic shingle on her desk advertised not her name but her department: Personnel.

“Help you?” she said.

“I’ve decided to leave the park,” I replied.

“That’s too bad.” It was quite obvious that she’d said these same words many, many times. “When were you thinking of going?”

“Now,” I told her.

When I got back to my room, Ray was rested and ready to go. “Are you sure you want to come?” he asked, knowing full well what my answer would be.

“Just drive me out of here,” I said.

I had lasted four weeks at Yellowstone and come away with two hundred dollars, a cowboy hat, and a strong desire never to see the inside of another bar as long as I lived. As we left the park behind and I watched the Grand Tetons come into view, I felt exhilarated, as if I’d pulled off an amazing escape. I also felt strangely guilty.

My journey across the country with Ray took almost four days. It was a trip punctuated by truck stop waitresses and hallu
cinations. Sometimes the two were interchangeable.

It was my job to plan our route with the aid of several maps that Ray had brought along. This is how I learned my United States geography. Wyoming led into Colorado, which led into
Kansas and then to Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. . . . Until we got to Missouri, all I could talk about was my Yellowstone experience, attempting to process it in my own mind before it became forever distorted by memory. Ray was still smarting over the fact that he hadn’t been hired and was uninterested in my tales. He had one question: “Did you sleep with anyone while you were there?” and once that was answered to his satisfaction, he stopped listening, preferring instead to dwell on the state of our relationship and whether or not it was going to last into the following year.

I celebrated my twentieth birthday in the endless state of Kansas under a blistering June sun. The car Ray was driving had no tape deck and received only AM radio stations. For hours, all we heard were songs by Toto (appropriately enough), which drove Ray nearly insane. To this day, I can’t hear “Rosanna” without having an instant vision of the parched grasses and end
less highway running through Kansas. By the time Missouri came into view, I had been without sleep for three days and my hallucinations were interfering with my ability to read the map or even sustain a conversation. I looked up at one point and saw an entire chorus line of prunes in martini glasses dancing across the shimmering horizon.

When Ray and I crossed the state line into New York two days later, we had run out of things to say to each other that wouldn’t lead to an immediate argument. Somewhere in Penn
sylvania, he had descended into knight-in-shining-armor mode and was convinced that he’d saved me from a fate worse than death. I was, in his mind, totally ungrateful for all his efforts. What’s more, he had taken to grilling me about my feelings for his friend, a topic that even in my altered state I was totally unwilling to discuss. It was probably mean-spirited on my part, but I felt he was overwhelmed by thoughts of his own signifi
cance in the grand scheme of things.

As a way of centering myself and deflecting the conversation away from the two of us, I asked Ray to drive into my old home
town of Monticello. I wanted to drive by my old high school and my old house. I wanted to swing by Maxman’s and see if the luncheonette was still there. Ray had always been a bit of a sucker for nostalgia, so he consulted the map and fearlessly drove into my past. I was surprised to see that so much of the terrain was unchanged. My old house was still exactly where we’d left it, the only difference being that there was a stranger in front of it mowing the lawn instead of my father. Ray kept uncharacteristically quiet while I looked at the house and let myself drown in memories. We were less successful when we looked for the luncheonette. Whether we were on the wrong road or it really was gone I wasn’t sure, but Maxman’s seemed to have vanished, Brigadoon-like, into the mists of time. Although I thanked Ray for taking the time to visit, I found the whole detour a bit depressing, as if too much of my life was impermanent and subject to the illusion of memory.