Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (24 page)
Read Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Online
Authors: Debra Ginsberg
Their response, immediate and uncensored, was overwhelm
ingly positive. Not only were they willing to help, they were actually excited at the prospect of a new baby. Not one member of my family expressed a single doubt or misgiving. How could I even ask, they wanted to know, of course they would be with me 100 percent. When would I know for sure?
“I know,” I said. “It’s a fact.”
“I thought so,” my mother said.
After this discussion, I decided that the best plan for the moment was to continue working at The Columbia until I started to show. Very few shifts later, this plan was rapidly
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derailed. I scheduled a meeting with Donna and told her that, through no advance planning, I was going to have a baby and I didn’t think I could continue working. To my surprise, Donna literally begged me to stay. It wasn’t at all a problem with her, she claimed, and I could take a leave when the baby came and be assured of having my job when I came back. It would be fun, she said, for all my coworkers to follow my pregnancy. She was sure everyone would be very supportive. She even offered to take me off Buck Night and schedule me for less physically demanding shifts. I must admit that I was actually thinking about this option and had almost decided it would be worth a try when she said something that changed my mind completely.
“It’ll be great,” Donna claimed. “You’ll probably make twice as much money as before. People will tip you
and
the baby.”
I suddenly had a vision of what I’d look like in my last trimester, carrying drinks around the bar. I thought about how much secondhand cigarette smoke I’d inhale and how unhealthy the atmosphere was on every level. It was a fairly disgusting picture.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, “I can’t do it.”
Waitressing is a singularly difficult job to hold while preg
nant, and not just because the physical demands are so great. Rather, I’ve noticed a certain attitude toward pregnant wait
resses, made up of both pity and consternation, that makes the work quite trying. Pregnancy just doesn’t fit the commonly accepted profile of a waitress—especially a cocktail waitress.
I’ve worked with two women who went through their preg
nancies in restaurants. Neither had an easy time of it. The first was a young unmarried woman whose pregnancy was totally unplanned. The managers of the restaurant hated the very idea of it and asked her if she didn’t think it would be best to work in a less stressful environment. She didn’t. Powerless to fire her for being pregnant, the managers cut this woman’s hours and
scheduled her to work the least profitable shifts. Their efforts to squeeze her out didn’t work and she stayed on until the week before she delivered.
The second woman was married and had planned her preg
nancy. She had also been waiting on tables for most of her adult life and knew her rights as a pregnant employee, having gone through her first pregnancy at another restaurant. Still, the man
agers weren’t particularly pleased at her expanding presence and griped that she wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demands of her job. She often got some unpleasant reactions from her cus
tomers. Viewing her as a piece of public property, men and women alike would rub her belly and ask her very personal ques
tions, like whether or not she was married and why she was working in a restaurant.
“They always look here,” she said, holding up her left fourth finger, which was bare due to swelling. “They don’t see a wed
ding band, so they think I’m some kind of loser. Like it’s shame
ful or something. As if it’s any of their business anyway.”
Even I had felt sorry for pregnant servers who waited on me. I felt as if I should be doing the work, not her. It was this feeling, more than any other, that convinced me I couldn’t stay on at The Columbia.
Donna had asked me to work through New Year’s Eve and I agreed to do so. The week before Christmas, however, I devel
oped a bad cold and found myself unable to move from my bed. I called Donna and asked if I could be relieved of a shift or two.
“Why don’t we just call it a day?” she snapped at me. “It’s obvious you don’t really want to be here.” I suppose I should have felt some remorse, but I was merely relieved. She wasn’t wrong, after all.
On the face of it, things were starting to look a little bleak. I now had no job at all and no steady income for the foreseeable future. My office job had recently come to an end as well, since
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Hank and Tim could no longer afford to pay me a salary of any kind. Tim had promised to keep me on as a freelancer for the paper, but those assignments would provide very little income.
I was also about to experience motherhood without the help or even the presence of the baby’s father. John had not reacted well to the news that he was to become a father. He had, in fact, given me a series of conditions under which he would provide me with support. Since most of these conditions involved termi
nating the pregnancy, we soon came to an unbreachable impasse. There followed arguments, tears, and plenty of accusations on both sides. The end result was that John left the city, the state, and any hope I might have had of his involvement in my life before I felt the baby’s first kick.
In addition, I had no idea what I was going to do once the baby came or where I was going to live. There was only so long I could manage in a studio apartment with a child, and besides, I didn’t know how the apartment managers would react to my adding a new tenant.
This was one side of the situation. There was a much rosier outlook on the flip side. I had no income, to be sure, but I did have all the money I’d saved from working so many jobs over the previous months. It wasn’t going to last forever, but it was something. I obviously wasn’t going to be using it to move any
where. I didn’t have John, but I had the unconditional support of my entire family along with their promises to be with me every step of the way. This was no small thing; it was an absolute life
saver. As for my impending motherhood, there are some things in life it’s just better to know less about before they happen. My lack of vision into my own future was a blessing that allowed for unlimited optimism.
It also looked as if there might be something of a solution to my joblessness. My father had been wanting, once again, to ven
ture into the restaurant business, and by the time I quit The
Columbia, he had rented a storefront in northeast Portland. This time the theme was New York–style pizza, and again he wanted it to be a family-owned-and-operated business. After much vot
ing, debate, and names drawn out of hats, Peppy’s was settled upon as the name of the new place. My sister Maya was taking some time off from college to lend her culinary talents, and the rest of the family planned to muck in as needed. My father’s hope for Peppy’s was that it would soon support our entire fam
ily. While the idea for Peppy’s had been germinating, I had gone from working at Molto’s to The Columbia and had thought I’d be able to help out only when I had days off. A few weeks into the construction of our new business, however, it became clear where I’d be spending most of my days.
My father had a vision of the way he wanted Peppy’s to look, which was a return to the old-fashioned diner style of his child
hood. With this in mind, we laid down black-and-white checker
board flooring, installed Naugahyde booths, and painted the walls in pinkish lavender. There were little touches, too. We bought old-style fountains for lemonade and grape juice, had a neon sign made for the front window, and I painted a giant pizza on the back wall so that it was directly in the line of vision of anyone ordering at the counter. We even rented a jukebox and two pinball machines. The jukebox, played only by members of our family, was a com
plete failure, but the pinball machines were extremely popular.
The menu was simple but specific and the taste had to be just right. My father had grown up in New York and both Maya and I had spent a good portion of our childhoods there. All of us had distinct memories of what New York pizza looked, smelled, and tasted like. Anyone who is a fan of real New York pizza knows that there are very few substitutes. There is a certain je ne sais quoi to a large, cheesy, aromatic slice of Brooklyn pizza that my father was determined to replicate. To this end, Maya and my father experimented with a variety of doughs, sauces, and cheeses until
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they produced something that satisfied their palates. I can’t say that New York–style pizza was unheard of in Portland at that time, but it was certainly a novelty. Franchise pizza shops and thick-crusted Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple–laden pies were more the accepted norm. Nevertheless, a couple of places featur
ing Big Apple pizza had recently sprung up and were developing devoted followings. My father was hoping for the same kind of response.
Our summer in the luncheonette had been the last time we’d all worked together like this and the memories were inevitable as we set up the restaurant. But while the dynamic in my family remained relatively unchanged, almost everything else about this venture was different. The luncheonette had been temporary. Peppy’s, we hoped, was permanent. The stakes, both financial and emotional, seemed quite a bit higher. As for me, I didn’t view Peppy’s as the gateway to romantic adventure as I had the luncheonette. The butterflies in my stomach had been replaced by morning sickness. I was still waiting to meet some
one who would change my life, but this time around that some
one was growing inside my own body. During the early days of Peppy’s, I couldn’t see much farther than that. Nor did I want to.
Pizza was one of Peppy’s selling points. The other was the fact that it was owned and run by a family (
our
family). My father felt that capitalizing on the whole family-values theme would appeal to our customers and make them want to buy pizza from us instead of a nameless, faceless franchise. With this in mind, we went around to introduce ourselves to our neigh
bors, all of whom we hoped would be eating their weights in pizza in the near future.
The district we’d set up in had no clear identity and was an eclectic mix of small businesses. One thing it had plenty of was character, and our neighbors, as it turned out, were quite an interesting group.
Our neighbors on one side were the husband and wife own
ers of a Vietnamese bakery. The wife was always there, day and night, sweating over various doughy creations. The husband came in and out, making deliveries and buying supplies. He spoke no English at all and the wife spoke very little. Neverthe
less, she was usually quite chatty in a broken-syllable kind of way. There were always a few of her family members around the bak
ery: young girls, babies, sometimes a boy or two. We had no idea what relation any of them had to each other. The wife (who never actually told us her name) appreciated the fact that we were a family working together. Every morning, we’d come in and buy a baguette for breakfast and she’d give us coffee on the house.
“No, no pay,” she’d say. “F’ee for you.”
Later, when my “delicate condition” started becoming obvi
ous, she’d attempt to press pastries and strange turnovers with fillings of undetermined origin into my hands.
“When baby come?” she asked.
“July,” I told her.
“Good. You take. You eat. Good for baby.” I took, but couldn’t eat. I believe she and her family felt more or less the same way about pizza. Although they were very friendly and very gener
ous, they never came over to eat at Peppy’s.
Our neighbor on the other side was a cobbler. A tiny Asian man who spoke even less English than the bakery owners, he kept very much to himself. In the entire time that we owned Peppy’s, we heard only two words from him. We could set our watches by him as every day at 5
P
.
M
. he’d walk into Peppy’s, slap a couple of quarters on the counter, and say, “Small Coke.” He never ordered pizza.
There was a faded single-screen movie theater across the street, which hadn’t yet figured out that it would have to become either an art house or a historical monument to compete with the multiplexes everywhere else. The theater manager, Leonard,
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was unkempt and extremely grumpy. When we devised a pizza special for matinee goers, Leonard flatly refused to place any fly
ers or menus in the lobby but came in himself to take advantage of the price breaks.
There was a florist on one side of the theater, owned and operated by a couple of middle-aged men, both named Ben. The Bens eschewed traditional arrangements for their flowers in favor of more artistic designs, most of which tended to be rather depressing if exotic. Because we liked to support all the local businesses, Maya and I purchased an arrangement from the Bens for our mother’s birthday that year. “You decide,” we told them. “It’s her birthday, so something cheerful and springlike would be good.” The resulting bouquet looked like it had been taken from the back of a hearse. It was so grim, in fact, that my mother actually laughed at the sight of it. The Bens, at least, stopped in for pizza once in a while, although neither one of them could tolerate tomato sauce, so we ended up designing a special “white pizza” just for them.
On the other side of the theater was a store that defied defi
nition. Everything in this warehouselike space looked as if it had either fallen off the back of a truck, been manufactured in a Third World country, or both—a dizzying collection of televi
sions, bicycles, baby strollers, lunchboxes, kites, and brightly colored plastic toys (the kind that had several removable parts suitable for choking small children). The store kept odd, erratic hours and was never staffed by the same people two days in a row. None of the staffers ever came in for pizza, incidentally, even before a fire swept through that store (and only that store) several months after we opened.
We set up an account for Peppy’s at a local bank at the end of the street. The tellers, all women, were usually dieting at any given moment, so we added salads to our menu to accommodate them. They were generally a very pleasant group and took a
genuine interest in how well we were doing. Unfortunately, they were often too traumatized to lunch at Peppy’s. Whether it was the location, lax security features, or simple bad luck, this partic
ular bank seemed to be one of the most often robbed institu
tions in the area. One particular teller, Rose, a divorced mother of two teenagers, had the misfortune of staring down the barrel of a gun twice in a two-month period.
Our happiest neighbors and our favorite customers by far were Kev, Mike, and Jeff, a trio of flamboyantly gay hairstylists located next door to the bakery. Kev was tall, barrel-chested, and had a long mane of ringlets. He dressed in billowy shirts, boots, and tight pants. The overall effect was Robin Hood meets the Cowardly Lion. Both my mother and I went to Kev to get our hair done and he regaled us with one outrageous story after another. Kev had little regard for public health warnings and swore to live his life exactly the way he wanted to. He told us tales of various hustlers he’d picked up, which we didn’t believe until one of them showed up at the salon one day and ended up eating pizza at Peppy’s. While he waited for an additional slice to go, Kev’s boy toy offered to marry me and “give your baby a name.” When I politely declined, he said, “No, really, I think pregnant women are very sexy.”
Mike was a little more restrained in both looks and attitude. He actually admitted to having a crush on my father, with whom he flirted shamelessly. Subject to huge mood swings, Mike either complained bitterly about the state of the world and all the peo
ple in it or was in a state of giddy ebullience. We never knew which it would be on any given day. Mike’s bipolar behavior bothered Kev, and Kev’s unapologetic posturing bothered Mike. The two would often come in separately, eat lunch, and com
plain about each other. On the fringes of these dramas was Jeff, who came in only a few days a week to service an established clientele. His uniform was simple: tank top, leather jacket, jeans,
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and a belt buckle with the word
QUEEN
stamped on it in four-inch metal letters. Jeff spoke very little, laughed a great deal, and smoked constantly. All three were big fans of our pizza and patronized Peppy’s almost daily. Of all the businesses in the neighborhood, they were the only ones to do so.
The grand opening of Peppy’s was hardly the rush we’d hoped for. In fact, business was decidedly slow for the first few months. My father had hoped to gain many regular customers from the foot traffic around the area. There was foot traffic, all right, but generally not the kind that generated income. For example, one regular visitor was a blind traveling salesman who poked his head into Peppy’s every other day or so and demanded to know “What is this place?” When told, he responded, “Wanna buy a handmade belt?” Since nobody ever did, he usu
ally backed out with the parting shot of “Ah, the hell with ya.” Then there were a regular contingent of night crawlers wanting to know “Where’s that titty bar at?” And we had a host of peo
ple who came in, walked up to the counter, stared at the menu, and then asked to use the bathroom.
We began advertising free delivery in the hope of generating sales from families in the surrounding neighborhoods. Maya and I called every friend and contact we had in the greater Portland area and invited them in for pizza. A few became regulars. Belinda came in to eat soon after we opened and told me that she had gotten a job as a bartender/cocktail waitress at a bar near her apartment. She was really enjoying it, she said, but for some reason she had recently gained quite a bit of weight. In fact, she showed me, she could barely close her jeans.
A month later, Belinda called to tell me that she, too, was pregnant. Her boyfriend wasn’t happy about the news, either, she said, and was refusing to speak to her. Her due date was less than two months after mine. Perhaps, she suggested, we could have a double baby shower?
Gradually, each member of my family began to assume a role at Peppy’s and our days started to follow a predictable routine. My father did all the ordering, buying, and deliveries. He pre
pared fresh sauce every morning, spending hours peeling garlic, sautéing mushrooms, creating salads and, later, lasagna. My mother spent her days working in an office and her evenings sit
ting at a booth in Peppy’s. My youngest sister, Déja, who’d been an infant when we had the luncheonette, was now nine years old. She perched behind the counter most afternoons, alternat
ing between pinball and homework. Maya made pizza and more pizza. In fact, she had touted her cooking skills so highly in the early days of Peppy’s that soon she was the sole pizza maker. Her position, seated or standing in front of the ovens, was one she would hold for the duration of the restaurant. The task of customer service was more or less relegated to me. With my doctor’s appointments, growing belly, and baby preparations, I wasn’t able to log as many hours at Peppy’s as Maya or my father. As it turned out, I was also unable to eat tomato sauce without getting sick, effectively eliminating pizza from my diet. All of this served to remove me from consideration as a cook of any kind. Besides, with all my experience at the table, I was a natural choice for front-of-the-house operations.
Every morning, my father and Maya picked me up at my apartment. The three of us ate breakfast together and planned out the day in terms of what had to be prepared and stocked or what flyers had to be designed and printed. Maya made dough and grated mozzarella cheese. I went to the bank for change. My father peeled garlic and, every half hour, moved his car into another temporary parking space. If it was slow and it looked as if I was becoming too sedentary, my father would leave notes for me at the cash register.
“The doctor says that walking is good for you,” one of these notes said. “P.S. We need tomatoes.”
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As the days grew warmer and longer, we all spent more time waiting, although very little of it involved waiting on tables. We waited every day for customers to arrive and all found our own ways to fill the downtime.
Perched by the ovens with her apron on, Maya read dozens of romance novels over the course of the days. She also indulged her penchant for soap operas. I watched with her as the soaps ran between what passed for a lunch rush and what might turn into a dinner rush. (We watched so often, in fact, that when my son was born he became his own study on the effects of prenatal stimulation. If he was fussy after lunch, I noticed that he became soothed as soon as one of the familiar soap theme songs played within his earshot. To this day, as well, pizza remains one of his foods of choice.)
Pinball was also a particularly popular time waster, and vari
ous family members competed for the highest scores. One machine, titled Centaur, featured a beast that was half man and half motorcycle. Periodically, as the balls zipped around, the machine would chant “Destroy centaur” in a particularly demonic tone. I heard it so often that my dreams often featured this phrase.
On a larger scale I waited to give birth. Pregnancy is a singu
lar challenge for those short on patience. The baby was due in early July. By mid-May I had read half a dozen books on preg
nancy and early motherhood. I’d given myself a baby shower at Peppy’s and had collected a substantial layette. I’d bought a crib and set it up in my apartment. I’d selected a name, Blaze, for the baby I was convinced was a boy. Maya was to be my labor coach, and by early June we’d completed childbirth classes together. I started beginning conversations about the baby with “When he gets out. . . .”
“When he
gets out
?” Maya scoffed. “You make it sound like he’s in jail in there. Why are you in such a hurry? Leave him alone and let him develop at his own pace, why don’t you?”
It was very difficult for me to wait it out after coming to this stage of readiness. Before this, my working days had been fast-paced and high pressure. Quiet gestation, therefore, was not a condition that came very easily.
I did have occasional writing jobs, which would periodically keep me busy. Tim would come into Peppy’s, eat a slice of pizza, and pick up the copy that I’d written. I never told him about my pregnancy, and although he sometimes stared directly at my belly, he never made a single comment until he called with an assignment a month after the baby was born and heard the unmistakable noises of an infant in the background. “Say, did you have a baby recently?” he asked. “I was just wondering. . . .”
Going through my pregnancy under the watchful eyes of not only my family but a daily host of strangers taught me how very public restaurant work is. Prior to Peppy’s, I had always felt there was a certain anonymity to waitressing. After all, with the exception of regulars, one’s customers are different every day. Each table is a chance to display a fresh persona, even a new identity if one so desires. But in truth, one really has to have an act to wait tables. A certain shtick is necessary at the table. This is what the customer is paying for. The average patron couldn’t care less if you’ve had a bad day, week, or month and he resents it if he’s forced to even consider this. He wants a smile, a dance, a bit of mystery.