Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (4 page)

“You’re so cute, it’s unreal,” he told me and I was hooked.

We made out in the indoor swimming pool and drew ini
tialed hearts pierced with arrows over the game-room jukebox.

Like every other teenage couple that summer, we had our own song. Steve cared very little about this detail, so I chose G4, “You Belong to Me.” Since I was on call for all three meals in the lun
cheonette, Steve spent a lot of time waiting for me to take breaks. He rose late and drank coffee in the mornings and played pinball through lunch. He’d stay up with me on Saturday nights as I worked, stealing me away for frequent make-out breaks on the paddleball courts. Sometimes he’d come in with his friends for dinner and they’d tease me when I came over to their table. No matter what meal I was serving, though, he was always there, smiling admiringly and whispering vaguely obscene com
ments as I passed by serving fruit plates and wiping down tables. Although I served breakfast and worked into lunch, my day didn’t really begin until I glimpsed the sight of Steve walking through the door, tossing his quarters, and heard him say, “Morning, babe. When are you getting out of here today?”

Steve’s mother, a flaming redhead with a Brenda Vaccaro voice, thought I was “adorable” and took several Polaroids of the two us posing,
Grease
style, at the pool. My father was definitely not as enamored with Steve. He kept a constant watchful eye on me, his eldest daughter, and grimaced every time he saw us flirt
ing. To avoid confrontations with my father, Steve and I would hold hands under newspapers on the counter and sneak short kisses behind the soda fountain. Every time my father disap
peared into the kitchen, we’d hurry to brush past each other to touch, however briefly. But one afternoon, my father came back to the luncheonette early after picking up some produce and found me sitting at a table next to Steve, who had his hand rest
ing on my naked knee. I knew I was in for it when my father’s gaze shot immediately to my leg. Steve yanked his hand back as if he’d been burned and I jumped up at the same time, but it was too late. My father was absolutely horrified and demanded that I “cool it with that boy” immediately. Of course, his disapproval
added an element of the forbidden to the whole thing and made it infinitely more appealing.

As the summer progressed, I got better at the tableside par
rying that was so integral to the job. I learned to carry more than one item at a time (although it would be many years before I could balance three plates on one arm while I carried a fourth in the other) and I learned to anticipate what our customers would order. I began receiving tips. Even Sophie Zucker left some crumpled dollar bills on her table after a meal.

(I also became aware of a fact that continues to be true. New Yorkers tip well. To this day, when I find a New Yorker seated at my table, I breathe a sigh of relief. No matter what the demands or how blunt the comments, I know there will be a nice reward waiting for me at the end.)

My liaison with Steve heated up as July moved into August. After one particularly late Saturday night, my family decided to spend the night at Maxman’s instead of driving home. I snuck out with Steve and two other couples and we spent the hours until dawn sitting on a cliff overhanging the freeway. This kind of make-out party was old hat for Steve and his buddies, but for me it was the most daring and exciting thing I’d ever done. I watched the sun rise in slow streaks of gold on the horizon as Steve dozed on my shoulder and knew I’d be in deep trouble for staying out all night, but I couldn’t have cared less at the moment. What I was doing just seemed so daring. The taste of that riskiness and its attendant freedom was truly sweet.

When I strolled into the luncheonette a few hours later (alone—I insisted that Steve not accompany me out of fear for
him
), my father was practically apoplectic. We had a tremendous fight over where I had been and what I had done, which ended with me tearfully shouting, “But I didn’t do anything wrong!” My father didn’t exactly forbid me to see Steve any longer, but disap
pearing with my boyfriend was no longer possible. My father and
I didn’t speak to each other for two weeks, which made working together in the heat of the luncheonette quite unpleasant. (To my father’s credit, he never confronted Steve about his misgivings, preferring to keep it strictly within the family, saving me from what would have been a supremely embarrassing scene.)

Naturally, this family feud only helped to make the relation
ship more intense, and as September crept into view, Steve accel
erated his efforts to take it one step further. Although I dreaded to think where she’d gotten her information, it appeared that Lori Zucker’s predictions were coming to pass. Tired of rounding the same two bases after six weeks, Steve sought creative arguments to entice me into going all the way. We’d soon be separated, he told me. He loved me, he said, didn’t I love him, too? Finally, he added, he’d be gentle. Despite a healthy curiosity on my part, I took the lesson of Valerie Grossman to heart and remained clothed from the waist down. Steve persisted. This struggle reached a feverish pitch over the Labor Day weekend. Aware that Steve and I would shortly be torn asunder, my father (he wasn’t heartless, after all) let me take Saturday night off so that I could spend it with Steve. While his parents enjoyed the last show of the season in the casino, Steve and I huddled together in his darkened bungalow. After an hour of endearments, persuasions, and passionate petting, I finally yielded.

“OK,” I told Steve, “let’s do it.”

“You mean it?”

“I mean it,” I said, wondering if I did.

Over the years, I’ve often wondered what happened to Steve in that moment because what he said next truly surprised me.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“You’re not ready,” Steve said, “and I don’t want your first time to be a bad experience. I can wait. I want to wait until you’re ready.”

Could he really be this sensitive, I wondered, or had his body been temporarily overtaken by an alien being? At any rate, I was astonished, amazed, and, from that moment forward, completely in love. I burst into tears of joy. Steve, too, was moved by his own gallantry and shed one or two of his own. We declared passionate and undying love for each other and then stumbled out into the brightness of the luncheonette, arms wrapped around each other. My father looked relieved that we’d emerged so early, and I helped close down dinner with a complacency that must have totally confused him.

In the last twenty years, I have rarely experienced moments such as the one I did that night in 1978. I had a devoted boyfriend who had just demonstrated his love for me in the most touching way I could have hoped for. My father was smil
ing at me, totally contented with my behavior for the first time all summer. Even my sister seemed unusually energetic and lively. I had everything I wanted and I was so happy I began weeping all over again. I felt I would live forever. Perhaps when one is sixteen this feeling is not such a difficult one to come by, but there have been precious few times since then when all seemed so right with the world and the future felt so full of life and promise. The color and bustle of the luncheonette were an integral part of all this, and it became, in my memory, forever fused with danger and delight, first love and triumph.

Over the next few days, we packed up the luncheonette and watched our regulars drift back to the city. My sister and I both received unexpected bonuses: many of our customers gave us chunks of cash for our devoted service throughout the summer. Sophie Zucker was among them.

School, when I returned the following week, seemed gray, uninviting, and terribly quiet. I missed the excitement horribly and spent the evenings writing down every moment of the previ
ous two months in my journal. I also wrote Steve a series of long
letters filled with yearning and declarations of love. When he proved to be a less than reliable correspondent, I turned my let
ters into short stories and folded them into notebooks at school, where they could be viewed over and over again.

My parents had quite a different reaction. My father spoke of going on a spiritual retreat after his experience running the lun
cheonette. In fact, he did something similar; nine months later we all moved to Oregon, a state considered so rural my friends couldn’t even pronounce it properly. And after sweating over roast pork and chicken all summer, all seven members of my family became vegetarian.

Although Steve and I had sworn to remain close, we drifted out of touch within a few months. I’ve never seen him again and so he remains forever the cute boy in tight white pants, smiling into the lens of a Polaroid camera. As for Maxman’s, it no longer exists. We had come into the luncheonette at the tail end of an era. Almost all of the bungalow colonies shut down and faded away shortly after.

I am jolted out of my reverie now by Gold Chains and his date, who are frantically waving me over to their table. Beside me is a stack of folded napkins a foot high. I’ve drifted far afield remem
bering the luncheonette. But I know once again why I am still here. There is the same underlying thrill of excitement and move
ment to this job now as when I was sixteen. To be sure, I have changed and the landscape is considerably different. I no longer feel I will live forever. Yet I can still remember what it felt like when every night was a new adventure. Gold Chains and his date are as much a part of these feelings as Sophie Zucker or even Steve. In the end, my relationships with all of these people (how
ever short) are what have kept me coming back for more. There is still the thrill of a good challenge for me here. More important,
perhaps, there is a certain romance inherent in making human connections.

As I head over to Gold Chains and his date, my attitude toward them shifts once again. They are my last table, and cash
ing them out will finally allow me to go home. When Gold Chains asks for the check (they are now in a tremendous hurry to leave), I am actually grateful. I don’t even care what or if they tip. I’ve already written them off and moved on.

The tip, in fact, will be the last piece of this adventure. Will I be rewarded for my efforts? I suspect not. The check is fifty-four dollars and change. Gold Chains pays with a hundred-dollar bill (somehow I’m not surprised—he just doesn’t look like the credit card type). I make change at the bar, which consists of a five-dollar bill and two twenties. I don’t bother breaking the twenties down. As far as I’m concerned, the smart bet is on a five-dollar tip. So be it. From a distance, I watch Gold Chains take some money out of the check cover and push the remainder toward the edge of the table. It’s my cue to come pick it up. After waiting a decent interval, I do just that.

“Thanks again,” Gold Chains tells me.

“Thank
you,
” I respond.

I wait until I’m out of view to open the check cover and look at the tip. Nestled there safely is one crisp twenty-dollar bill.

[ ]

tw o

tippin
g
(i t’s not a city in china
)

My last year of high school
was an exercise in homoge
nized boredom. In the spring of my junior year, my family moved from upstate New York to a suburban area outside Portland, Oregon. It was pretty and it was green, but I found absolutely nothing to connect with in my new school or my new class
mates. I’d gone from a scrappy, decidedly multicultural environ
ment to one that very closely resembled Ira Levin’s Stepford. Everyone at my new school, it seemed, was given a car for his or her seventeenth birthday. The highest social achievement for boys was a spot on the football team. For girls, it was the pep squad. When, inexplicably, the Drama Department decided to stage
Fiddler on the Roof
as their musical, the cast was made up of blond, blue-eyed cheerleaders and football players who had tremendous trouble pronouncing the names of the characters. My sister, who played the actual fiddler, was the sole Jewish cast member.

I felt extremely out of place in this environment and made no lasting friends. I felt I was in a state of suspended animation
for much of my last year in high school. In my journal, which had become my best and closest confidant, I ended almost every entry by whining that I was waiting, eternally it seemed, for my life to really begin.

Instead of participating in after-school activities (not that there were any for me), I decided to find a job. Since the lun
cheonette, my father had changed his tune about not wanting me to work. He now thought it might be quite a good idea for me to save money for college, where we all agreed I would be going as soon as I graduated.