Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (21 page)

I began feeling nostalgia for Molto’s as soon as I quit. The few days I was going to give myself to relax and make plans turned into weeks. I kept going to work at the office during the day, but my nights seemed absolutely vast and empty. Suddenly there seemed to be a huge hole in what had been passing as my social life. Despite the fact I had sworn to move on, Molto’s still felt a bit like home.

It was with this feeling that I stopped in soon after I quit to say hello. Nobody seemed to understand quite what I was doing there since I’d so recently been adamant about not wanting to come in for as long as possible. As if to make me feel a little more comfortable, Barry invited me to a party he was throwing the following weekend.

“It’s for all the Molto’s survivors of the summer of eighty-six,” he said. “You definitely fall into that category, so you should come by.” I told him I would and wrote down directions to his house. “Tell Tiffany,” he added, laughing. “She can come, too.” Tiffany was still in town, although I saw considerably less of her at that point. After rehashing some of her most spectacular feats at Molto’s, I told Barry that I’d let her know about the party.

“I’ll just make sure she gets her drinks in a paper cup,” he said.

I’ve often wondered about the strange chain of events that followed that visit to Molto’s because, on the one hand, it seemed that what followed was merely a series of choices that could have been presented to anyone. On the other hand, what was to come seemed peculiarly predestined. I’ve never been able to figure out which was which.

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I didn’t want to go to Barry’s party. In fact, as soon as I returned home, I decided it would be a bad idea. I hadn’t left on particularly good terms with Sonny and I was sure that he and Barbara would be there together. Hostility would be high and I wasn’t in the mood to be dragged into a catfight. Nor, after my last night at Molto’s, was I much in the mood to see Wes. I knew from Barry that Sue was visiting Wes from California and figured I was the last person he’d want to see at a party. There was Barry, too, and his relationship with Pamela. I figured that the party was probably Barry’s way of safely inviting her to his house. The guy was so desperate to see her, he’d risk seeing the husband in a social situation. It could be quite ugly. Besides, I told myself, I’d resolved to leave this all behind. Why would I intentionally place myself in the lion’s jaws?

Then Tiffany dropped by. I have no idea how she’d learned about Barry’s party, but by some wrinkle of fate, she knew all about it and was determined to go. She was also determined to take me with her. I argued with her about it, but without sharing too many personal details I couldn’t come up with any valid rea
sons why I shouldn’t go. When she pointed out that I’d probably spend the night alone watching
Miami Vice
instead of going out “and having some fun for a change,” I found it difficult to turn her down.

So we went.

Barry’s party was exactly as I had suspected it would be. Barry was, if possible, more uptight than he was when managing the restaurant. I soon understood the reason: Pamela was there, without her child or her husband, nervously fussing around Barry’s kitchen. The torturous byplay between these two served to add an element of freneticism to the whole affair. Barry was besotted with Pamela by that point and she was playing quite a number on him. All the while he was trying to act as cool as pos
sible, which wasn’t working very well. Out of the corner of my
eye, I noticed him drinking heavily and making various trips to his bedroom with various friends and various envelopes of white powder.

I paid little attention to this, however, since I was caught in the generous swell of my own soap opera. As I had predicted, both Sonny and Wes were in attendance and so were Barbara and Sue. Sonny had no idea what approach to take with me and ended up using several in the course of a few minutes, which made him appear like an utter fool. Barbara had decided to be extremely nice to me, which was much more frightening than if she’d leaned over and pulled out my hair—which was clearly what she would have preferred.

Sue’s looks had only been improved by her time in Califor
nia. She looked ready for the cover of an alternative lifestyle ver
sion of
Vogue.
Wes made sure he had at least one of his hands on some part of her body at all times. For me, he had only a glower and this question: “Weren’t you leaving town?”

“Nice to see you, too, Wes,” I answered and escaped to the kitchen, where I was rescued by Charlotte, who knew all about uncomfortable restaurant encounters, having been part of a few in her day.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said, leading me to a tall, dark stranger who was leaning awkwardly against a cab
inet, looking as if he’d wandered into the wrong party. “This is John,” Charlotte said, smiling. “We worked together at Molto’s years ago. John’s a writer, too.”

With my eyes, I telegraphed a message of dismay to Char
lotte, but she shrugged and smiled again as if to tell me that I might actually like this John person and promptly melted into the scenery.

While John and I spent the next half hour standing in exactly the same spot, we covered a tremendous amount of conversa
tional ground. He, too, had wandered into Molto’s out of a sense

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of nostalgia a few days earlier and received an invitation to the party from Barry. He, too, was working on a first novel. He, too, was planning a move to San Francisco in the near future, having been convinced that finding work in Portland was impossible. We talked about Molto’s, past and present. I learned that not much had changed over the course of the last five years. We talked about writing and discussed the plots of our novels. I wasn’t at all surprised when he told me he’d love to read what I’d written. John was, quite obviously, very eager. In fact, it occurred to me that he’d come to this party specifically to meet somebody he could leave with. I wasn’t about to go anywhere with him, but I was intrigued by him and told him that I was planning to attend a lecture a local literary agent was giving the following week.

“Why don’t you give me your phone number?” he said. “Maybe we could go together.”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe.”

“I’m really glad I came to this party,” he said impulsively. “Until the last minute I wasn’t going to come at all. I didn’t actually think there’d be anyone here for me to talk to.”

I’d almost forgotten about John by the time he called me a few days later, but I was happy to hear from him. The lecture by the literary agent became our first date and was rapidly followed by a second. Within a couple of weeks we were inseparable. There was a level of intensity to my relationship with John that I’d never experienced before. The whole thing seemed to be oper
ating at an accelerated speed. It almost seemed that if we slowed down, spent less time together, what was building between the two of us would vanish. It was actually a bit frightening to get so close to someone so quickly, especially since what was developing between us had the feeling of something serious.

At the height of our romantic bliss, we took a trip to Molto’s for dinner. It was only fair, we reckoned, that we go in and thank both Barry and Charlotte for helping us meet.

Barry seemed nonplussed but relatively amused at our gush
ing declarations of love for each other, but Charlotte just laughed.

“I knew you two would hit it off,” she said.

John and I continued to spend as much time together as pos
sible, but it soon became apparent that both of us were going to have to start thinking of a future beyond the dawning of the next day. Neither one of us wanted to leave the other, but we hadn’t known each other long enough to suggest leaving together, so both of us put our plans to move on temporary hold. John had recently left a job working in a halfway house for troubled teens, because of the high stress and terrible pay. While he scouted around for a teaching position, he took a night job as a prep cook in a small Mexican restaurant to make ends meet.

My part-time writing work wasn’t nearly enough to float me, and without the income from Molto’s, I was days away from dip
ping into the meager savings I’d so carefully accumulated over the previous few months. Despite my new romance and subse
quent lease on life, I began to have nagging feelings of insecurity. If nothing else, waiting tables had provided me with a sense of self-reliance. There was a certain security within the walls of a restaurant, which I was missing. Not wanting to admit that my plans to try to make it as a writer had been relegated to the back burner, I told myself that I wouldn’t be going anywhere if I let myself run out of money entirely. Waiting seemed, again, the only option. And again, it would be a temporary measure, some
thing to gain a financial foothold while my future unfolded. The only question remaining was which restaurant I would work in.

I wanted to synchronize my hours with John’s, so I went looking for a restaurant with late hours. This meant that I’d be looking at restaurants that doubled as bars. I had only looked at a couple of these places before learning that The Columbia, an extremely busy, high-volume bar close to my apartment, was hir
ing cocktail waitresses.

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I liked the idea of cocktailing and, even after my unprofitable stint at Le Jardin, still thought there was something that sounded very glamorous about it. Of course, my ideas about these things were predicated on some decidedly nonfeminist notions. I had grown up idolizing Barbara Eden’s character on
I Dream of Jeannie.
And though I’d never admitted it to anyone, I thought that the bunny outfits the waitresses wore in the Play
boy Clubs were really cute.

The cocktail waitress, I learned, is a unique breed. Her finan
cial success often depends on her physical attributes as well as her ability to take any number of rude, sexist, even abusive com
ments with a smile and a quick comeback. Her job is to serve alcohol, but she is held accountable for those who become overly intoxicated. She has to carry several drink orders in her head and make change instantly with one hand while the other balances a tray of glasses, coins, and bills. Most of the cocktail waitresses I’ve known go home late at night and dream about the job.

Belinda, veteran of so many waitressing jobs, once told me, “Cocktailing dreams are the worst. It’s not like you’re dreaming about not being able to catch up with your tables. When you dream about cocktailing, it’s like you’re going crazy. People are shouting drink orders at you, you drop all your change, and you spill everything on your tray over and over again.” She was absolutely right.

When I set out to apply for a job at The Columbia, I was hoping not to repeat my experience at Le Jardin, which was both interesting and challenging but stressful beyond belief. The rea
sons for the stress had little to do with the physical demands of the job. Rather, the depression I felt after almost every cocktail shift had to do with watching the interaction between people and alcohol. The transformation I saw in average humans after the consumption of a few drinks seemed to me both raw and desperate—something I’d just as soon forget. It is often said
that what one dislikes most in others is what one dislikes most in oneself. Perhaps my negative impressions of the cocktail hours I worked had something to do with my state of mind when I worked them: a bit raw and a little desperate.

Le Jardin, filled with blond wood, houseplants, and, every evening at happy hour, suited men drinking scotch and bourbon, was the most depressing place I’ve ever held a tray in.

Up to that point, my cocktail experience had been limited to a few shifts serving highballs to octogenarians in the Card Room. Le Jardin was different only in the fact that the mean age of its patrons was about thirty years younger. During the shifts I worked, at least, the clientele was almost exclusively male. They came down from their offices at five or five-thirty, picked list
lessly at the cocktail wieners dying slowly on the happy hour buffet, and then buried themselves in booths, waiting for me, Belinda, or whatever other cocktail waitress was working to walk over in her high heels and little black skirt and offer to get them whatever they wanted. And what they wanted was usually a martini or a scotch and conversation. There were a few ques
tions I heard repeatedly:

“How long have you been working here?”