Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (41 page)

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 writ
ing 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 lim
ited 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 watch
ing 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 cus
tomer 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 wait
resses: 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 litera
ture 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 writ
ing. 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 some
where, 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 exac
erbated 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 cloth
ing.” 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 unhap
piness 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 difficul
ties; 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 man
agers 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.

[ ]

epilogu
e

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 (particu
larly 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 hap
pened 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.