Here's What I'll Remember About My Last Day: That Table of Seventeen and the Pea-Hating Lady with the Mustache

Last night was my last night at the restaurant. The Boy From Work had scheduled me to work my last day with my favorite people: my favorite waitress, my favorite dish people, my favorite ice cream people. The only person missing was my favorite cook, the girl who was good spirited enough to host a going away party for one of the ice cream boys, a party where the departing ice cream boy vomited everywhere and the boys had to tie plastic bags on their feet just to get into the bathroom and try to get him in the shower so he could puke into the current of moving water. Later, my favorite cook would spend hours scouring the ice cream boy's puke out of her carpet and off her toilet. Later, she would be the one to get the ice cream boy in the shower. She would stay up with him all night, and she would take care of him the next morning. If that's not a good hostess, then I don't know what is.

Anyway, last night was my last night. At first it seemed like it was going to be just another Wednesday night at the restaurant, but things took a turn around six o'clock. I already had some decent tips in my pocket, and I was feeling pretty good about my last day. I'd had a group of four sit at the counter and tell me I was a great little server, that the food and service was wonderful. They left me eight dollars on a bill that definitely did not call for an eight dollar tip. I thought, What a way to make an exit. It seemed the best kind of last night to have: a complimentary, well monied night.

But a little after six o'clock several cars pulled into the parking lot. The car doors swung open and out poured people, people, people. They walked the entire length of the restaurant's large front window. There was no end to them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven...

"Oh my God," my favorite waitress said. "This is yours. I want nothing to do with it."

The people kept coming. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen...

"Gee, they could have called ahead," she said, and then she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with the large table.

The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth person finally filtered into the restaurant, and we arranged the entire back section for them.

I've never been the type of waitress to delight in big tables. The girls at my last waitressing gig salivated and fought over big tables. I always bowed out. I just wasn't a fan. There's so much potential for disaster when waiting on a large group. So many things can go wrong. Drink orders can go awry, food can come out on the wrong plates, the people themselves can be snobby and rude. I prefer to deal with people in small doses. I like a table of two, three, four, five. I feel like I can give better service when I don't have to raise my voice to Teaching Composition octave just to announce that I'm taking only drink orders and that I'll come back for the food orders after the drinks have been filled.

But these people, my goodness, they were dolls.

The table was comprised mostly of kids and teens (and the gayest twelve year old boy I'd ever met), so I'd dreaded my first approach to the table. Kids can be awful, they can be pains, they can make you want to strangle them. But these kids were heaven-sent, polite, super sweet. They said please and thank you. They complimented the food and service. They joked around with me. They turned on the jukebox and danced. They made the other customers smile.

I loved them.

When they left, the table of seventeen left me a big, fat tip. At this point I was definitely thinking, Okay, alright, great. This is my kind of last night.

Then 8:20 rolled around. That's when a family of four sauntered through the door and sat themselves at the first booth. At first they--a father, a mother, two girls--seemed mostly normal. They were the usual clientele: worn-looking rural-types, the man with a gristly beard, the mother with her own budding mustache. The girls were little and cute, but you could tell a few years later, when they were in the big school district next door to the one I attended, they would become girls so similar to many of the girls I worked with: cute girls with horrific grammar, girls whose main passion it was to stir up drama, girls who thought nothing of sleeping with other girls' boyfriends and then laughing about it over a burger and a shake.

But for now those little girls were fine and sweet and nice. They wanted chicken fingers, and they wanted them hot and with extra bleu cheese. Their mother and father wanted the daily special--the chicken and biscuits, which I had been coveting all night. The mother requested that the mashed potatoes that came with the special also be covered with gravy, but that was as much direction as they gave me.

Well, it turned out that they should have given me a whole bunch of directions. For starters, someone should have directed me to the fact that the mother was unstable, weepy, and vaguely crazy.

After I'd delivered their food I gave them a few minutes before popping back in to see how they were doing. When I arrived at their table, the father and the girls were eating like normal humans. The mother, however, was not. She had her face cradled in her hands and she was sniffling. No one was paying her any mind.

I didn't know what to do. "Uhm, how is everything over here?" I asked.

One of the girls waved her fork at her mother. "Could you get that plate out of her way?" she asked. "She doesn't like peas."

The woman was crying because the chicken and biscuits came with vegetables in it--quite standard, actually--and the inclusion of peas had wracked her to the core.

I blinked and blinked but picked up the plate and whisked it away. As I walked away from the table I was bombarded with thoughts. First, was the woman not a grownup? Could she not handle asking me to take her food away like an adult? Did she really need her children--who couldn't be more than twelve years old--to translate her sobs for her?

Second, if someone doesn't like peas so much and would be reduced to tears at their mere presence in a dish at a restaurant, wouldn't you think it wise for that person to perhaps clue the waitress and cooks in on the aversion?

This whole mess reminded me of a memorable Monday night--all you can eat pasta night--I was waitressing at the old joint. A woman placed an order for the spaghetti with meatballs and never said a single word about having an allergy that might flare up depending on what was in the spaghetti or sauce. When I brought out her plate, which was garnished with Parmesan and parsley, she shrank back in her seat. She was appalled. "What is that?" she asked, wagging her finger at the Parmesan.

I told her it was Parmesan cheese, just a garnish.

"I," she said, her voice horrified, "am allergic to Parmesan cheese! You need to get it away from me!"

Yes, lady, right. Because you would never in a million years guess that Parmesan cheese might come with or on or even in the sauce of spaghetti.

The lady with the peas reminded me of that lady. Except as far as I could tell, she wasn't allergic to peas, just terribly disturbed by their presence.

But I went over to that table with a menu in my hand and gave the pea lady a few more minutes to dry her eyes, to dry the moisture that had accumulated in the prickly stubble of her upper lip, and then I took her order for the fried chicken dinner. I went over several more times after that to make sure that this time things were okay, that she was happy, that she was satisfied now that any and all peas had been taken from the proximity.

I wondered what was going to happen when the bill came. I wondered if they were going to be angry that I charged them for her dinner. I didn't feel as though it was right to take off the price of her dinner when we hadn't done anything wrong, when she had just neglected to tell me she had a serious problem with peas. I even wondered if maybe this were some sting operation, the kind of which I'd heard about before--a family going into a restaurant, one of them raising a fuss and claiming the food was bad or wrong, then trying to get worked into such a lather over it that the manager or person in charge was forced to placate them by making the check disappear.

These people were going to be the last people I waited on at the diner, and these were the people I was going to remember for a long time. I prepared for the worst--screaming, fit-pitching, more crying--but nothing happened. In fact, they even left me a good tip. And then they left and we were able to sweep the floors, mop the floors, put up the stools at the counter, roll the next day's silverware, put away the pitchers of iced tea and lemonade, wipe down the ice cream counters, and that was it, it, it. I walked out of that restaurant with a thick wad of money in my pocket and shoulders that felt lighter.

It's been an interesting summer. I went into the whole summer job thing, the whole return to waitressing, with a big swallow of dread caught in the back of my throat. I felt above it, like I shouldn't have to go back now that I'd gone through graduate school, now that I'd spent a few years teaching college level writing. I whined. I even cried. After I got the job at the diner, I drove home thinking oh God oh God oh God oh God. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to do it. I thought no one would like me, that I'd be too old, that they'd think I was no fun, that the whole experience would be awful.

All of that worrying was for nothing. The summer was fun, and I liked almost everyone I worked with, and I'm pretty sure they liked me back. (Some, of course, more than others.) It was a hectic time, and I wrote almost nothing, which completely violated all my summer goals, but now that I've had my last day I feel like my head's on straight again, that I'm not going to be so caught up in the drama of the place, that I'll finally be able to get some things done--things like gutting this room I've been living in for the last year, my old room, my room decorated with the suns and moons I was so crazy over in high school. I'm starting to pack today, starting to sift things into boxes, starting to put things in piles to be packed into cars for my big move that's going to happen in a week's time. I've got an awful lot of work ahead of me...

Of All the Strange Birds, This One Is the Strangest (Part Two)

The Stoned Cowboy brought his family in last week. I was working a split shift where I was covering lunch and dinner. Since I was working the split shift, the other lunch girl had gone home and the other dinner girl hadn't gotten there yet. I was alone.

When the Stoned Cowboy's red van pulled in I groaned, but I immediately shoved my escalating annoyance away when I saw the doors swing open, when I saw a woman step down from the van, when I saw a child tumble out of the back.

"Stoned Cowboy, Stoned Cowboy, Stoned Cowboy!" I hissed into the kitchen. "And he's brought his family!"

The Stoned Cowboy pushed into the restaurant and stopped dead when he saw me standing behind the counter. "You!" he exclaimed. I froze. "I want you as my waitress!" he said.

"Well," I said, "you're lucky. I'm the only one here. Looks like you're stuck with me."

He turned to his wife. "This," he said, gesturing to me, "is Jessica." He nodded at his wife for my benefit. "This is my wife," he said. "Remember how I was telling you she was away? Well, she's back now."

I nodded and smiled brightly, even though the Stoned Cowboy had never told me his wife was away. I reached for some menus.

The Stoned Cowboy, his wife, and his son filed back to the rear of the restaurant and seated themselves at a booth. The Stoned Cowboy waved away the menu when I tried to set it in front of him. "You know what I want," he said.

A reuben. He wanted a reuben. It would be his fourth of the week, and those are just the ones I witnessed during my shifts. Reubens are wonderful sandwiches--one of my favorites, actually, delicious, gooey, tangy things that always hit the spot--but I wasn't exactly sure if it was a good idea for one person to eat that many reubens in a week's time. I could see all the Stoned Cowboy's veins flooding with Thousand Island dressing, his heart being tangled in sauerkraut.

Well, he wasn't the only one who wanted a reuben. His wife did too. "He can't stop talking about them!" she said.

The son didn't want a reuben. He wanted a Buffalo Chicken Wrap, without tomatoes.

I took down the information and went back to the kitchen. The Boy From Work was manning the grill again because the lunch shift cook was busy making pies in the back. I handed him the order. "Enjoy," I said.

When I took out their drinks, the Stoned Cowboy introduced me to his son. "Peter?" he said. "Peter, this is Jessica."

Peter stared at me. He looked about as excited as if it had just been announced he was going to have three teeth ripped from his head without Novocaine. He was a cute kid, really. He didn't look like either of his parents. He wasn't straggly and gangly like his father, nor was he plain but normal-looking like his mother. He had a wide face, but it was striking. He seemed like the type of kid who would grow up to be attractive. He had pretty, clear eyes, good skin, moppy hair. He was emitting an attitude of casual boredom, like he was thinking about being bored but it was just too much work, so he was only going to be half-bored.

"Say hello, Peter," the Stoned Cowboy said.

"Hi," Peter said.

"Hey, listen," the Stoned Cowboy said. "Tell me how you spell your name, okay?"

"Mine?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "How do you spell Jessica?"

I spelled it for him. He whipped open his cell phone and started pressing buttons. "There," he said. "J-E-S-S-I-C-A. You're in."

I was in? He would've had to hold me down and torture me with spiders and snakes and other foul slithery/crawly things for me to give up my phone number, so I wasn't exactly sure what he was up to.

"Well," he started, "this is for whenever I need to call here. I'll just call you! I'll call Jessica and order a reuben."

I walked back to the kitchen then. I needed to get away. I needed to be with reasonable people. People who were not at all eighteen different shades of strange.

"I think maybe I'll run away with the Stoned Cowboy," I told the BFW. "He's a big fan of mine. He wants me to wait on him all the time, and he just programmed my name into the phone so every time he needs to call here to get a reuben, he'll just scroll down to my name." I paused, raised my eyebrows. "Who does that? Seriously."

The BFW flipped the reuben and looked not at all concerned about my possible running away with the Stoned Cowboy. He did, however, tell me the man was nuts.

Later, after I had brought their meals to them, and after I had given them enough time to savor and check things out, I went back out to the table and asked how the food was. The Stoned Cowboy gave me a sad look.

"I'm not mad, okay?" he said. "Alright? I'm not mad, but this beef is a little bit tougher than it usually is. The beef is usually so tender. I tell everyone how tender it is. I tell the guys at the bank and the gas station that you have the tenderest beef, the best reubens. But this one is just a little bit tough, okay?"

I apologized the best I could, and he nodded along with my words.

"You should tell them that," he insisted. "Tell the cooks that the beef is just a little bit tougher than it usually is."

I said I would, I certainly would tell them that.

"I'm not mad, though," he said. "And definitely not at you. You can't control it. Just tell the cooks, okay?"

I said I would, I certainly would. Then I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a Pepsi. If this was the beginning of my day, I was going to need a few billion shots of caffeine.

A few days later, I arrived at work only to be cornered by one of the cooks. "You will never guess what happened the other day," she said.

"What?" I asked.

"The phone was ringing and no one was able to grab it, so I did," she said. "The guy on the other end said, 'Is this Jessica?'"

"Oh no," I said. Apparently the Stoned Cowboy thought I was always there, that I was a fixture at the diner, that I had a mattress in the back, that I rolled out in the morning, took a shower, donned my black pants and white shirt, and came out to waitress around the time he was getting a hankering for a reuben.

"I told him it wasn't. He wanted to know if you were there. I said you weren't."

"He ordered a reuben?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "He ordered a to-go reuben, and I made it for him immediately. He didn't show up for, like, an hour and a half."

So we stood there wondering what kind of world the Stoned Cowboy lived in, what kind of job he held. We figured it probably wasn't one that was interested in strict timetables, in sharp businessmen, in concrete goals. I could see the Stoned Cowboy living on a commune somewhere with his children--he and his wife have several more, together and from previous marriages--and I could see him tending crops, sitting in the middle of a field with a hoe across his knee, a cigarette in his mouth, old Tom Petty pouring from his headphones. I could see him putting a hand on his stomach, realizing it was time for lunch. I could see his mouth watering for a tender cut of beef between slices of grilled rye. I could see him picking up his phone and calling the diner, hearing a girl answer, and I could see him saying, "Hey, Jessica. It's me. I need a couple reubens for the road. Is the beef tender today?"

Of All the Strange Birds, This One Is the Strangest (Part One)

I've waited on some strange people during my various stints as a waitress, but I have never met anyone like the man who came into the restaurant during my Friday double shift.

The man loitered near the front door. He looked confused, like maybe he was waiting for someone. He took a couple steps toward the pie case, bent, assessed the pie. Then he leaned over and started talking to another of the waitresses. It almost looked like he was trying to be sly about smelling her.

"Do you guys have reubens?" he asked.

"Yes, we sure do," the waitress said.

"Yeah," the guy said, "I know. I had one yesterday when I came in with my wife and kids."

The waitress looked confused. I widened my eyes at her.

"Well, you've had our reubens then," she said. "Did you enjoy?"

He said he did. He said he enjoyed them so much that he came in for another today. Then he sauntered off toward a booth. He walked with a sway, a sway that said I am not entirely sober right now.

"He's all yours," the waitress told me, and she passed me a menu.

The man was dressed in tattered jeans, boots, a worn plaid shirt, and a cowboy hat that was decorated with a crown of fresh flowers. His hair--ringlets tinged with gray--fell down past his shoulders and looked suspiciously like it hadn't been washed in several days.

"You can just put the order for the reuben in," he told me.

"Okay," I said. "And what can I get you to drink?"

"Water," he said. "I'm a water-man." Then he sang a little song about being a water man. Water, water, water-man.

I nodded slowly, in case he was having trouble seeing me--because by this point it was clear that he was stoned out of his mind--and I started walking back to the kitchen.

"Wait!" he said. I turned. "What kind of soup do you have?"

We had creamy kielbasa soup (winner in the Most Creative Way to Get Rid of the Leftover Kielbasa Casserole Special from Yesterday category) and our standard French onion, so I told him so.

"Can I have the menu?" he asked. He plucked it out of my hand and spread it out in front of him. He traced his fingers over the words HOMEMADE SOUP. "Can I keep this for a bit?" he asked. He kept tracing the words. He wouldn't stop.

"Sure," I said. "And can I get you any soup?"

He nodded, but he didn't stop tracing the words.

"Which kind?" I asked. "The kielbasa?"

"Blecch," he said.

"The French onion then?"

"Alright," he said. He proceeded to whip out a cell phone with all the bells and whistles and started typing a text message. He would continue typing through dinner.

And aside from him being a bit off, a bit odd, and aside from him looking and acting like a stoned cowboy who wandered in from the 1960's, I could've let it go. I could've let it slide. I could've let all the slurping of the soup and the texting and the mumbling during the texting and the slurping of the sauerkraut and the wandering around the restaurant like it was his own kitchen and it was the middle of the night and he was seriously jonesing for a late snack--well, I could've let all that go, but he came in the next day. And he proceeded to be even weirder.

The next day when I arrived for my dinner shift, one of the other waitresses announced that the Boy From Work (see also: this, part one of this, and our official gang photo) said I should get to take the table that had just walked in. When I peered around the corner to see who it was, there was the stoned cowboy again, wandering around the restaurant like it wasn't going to creep out the other customers.

I sighed. "Gee, thanks, BFW," I said. BFW was standing behind the grill, as he was cooking until the night cook got there. BFW had the makings of a reuben already geared up and ready to go.

"This makes three days in a row that this cat has been here," I said, and then I walked out to the table.

The stoned cowboy was once again stoned. His arm and leg movements were loose and random. He was bopping his head to something, and when I got closer I could see he had headphones stuck in his ears.

I smiled when I got to his table. He smiled back.

"Hello again," I said. "What can I get for you today?"

He gestured to the headphones, like, Duh, I can't hear you. "Music," he said, by way of explanation. Finally, he tugged them out of his ears. "What?"

I asked him again what he wanted. He said he wanted everything he had yesterday, just the way it was, just exactly, except he wanted fries instead of chips and he didn't want soup. "You guys makes the best reubens," he said.

I marched back into the kitchen and tore the slip of paper from my pad. I leaned over to scribble the BFW a note. It said, Reuben w/ fries. XOXO, Jess. P.S. This guy is cuh-razy. Thanks.

Then I went to deliver his drink. When I'd asked him what he wanted to drink, I braced myself for the water-man song, but I didn't get it. He just sighed and shrugged and said, "Oh, a water, I guess," in a dejected kind of way.

When I set the water down in front of him, the stoned cowboy again had his headphones in. And he wasn't satisfied with me just dropping the drink and retreating.

"Hey," he said as I started to back away. "Here. Come here."

He had pulled the headphones out and was holding one up like a peace offering. He gestured toward my ear.

I didn't know what else to do--after all, how do you politely tell someone you don't want to put something that was in their ear in your ear for fear of waxy particles, etc.--so I bent down and tried to stay as far away from the earpiece as possible.

He jabbed it closer. I could hear a familiar song, something I hadn't heard in years.

"How about that?" he asked.

The song sounded like exactly the right song the stoned cowboy should be walking around listening to. If they were making a movie about his life, that song would've been piped in under the opening shot of him ambling down the street.

"I remember that song," I said. I couldn't exactly place it, but I knew it involved a Beatle somehow.

"Who is it?" the stoned cowboy quizzed.

I shrugged. "I can't remember," I said.

He looked disappointed. "It's the Traveling Wilburys," he said. "They're a super-group. Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and George Harrison were all in it."

"Oh," I said. "Cool. I like that song." I wasn't sure what to do then. He was looking at me so expectantly, like he was waiting for me to say something brilliant, something profound. I had nothing to say, so I just smiled and left.

Later, as I was delivering an order of food to another table, I had to walk past the stoned cowboy. I had my arms filled with chicken fingers and beef on wecks, but that didn't stop the stoned cowboy from trying to get my attention.

"HEY!" he said. He had his headphones in, so he was shouting. The customers looked alarmed. "HEY, my flowers died!" He held up his cowboy hat so I could see that the fresh flowers he had at one point stuck in the brim were now wilted and limp.

I stopped. I was balancing several plates. I was clearly in a hurry to get to another table. Yet this man thought it was completely fine, normal, and acceptable to kick up a conversation about his hat flowers when I had steaming food in my hands.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I need new ones," he said. "You think so, right? I need new ones?"

I nodded. "Yes, I do. Fresh flowers are very pretty."

"Okay," he said, then nodded. I was dismissed.

The afternoon was filled with more exchanges like that--mostly he wanted to talk about the tenderness of the beef and how he was going around town telling everyone that the diner had really tender beef, and he was even telling complete strangers about the tenderness--and then he was gone. He got back into his red minivan--yes, the stoned cowboy pilots a red minivan--and left the diner to go about his business, his strange, strange business of tooling around town and looking for fresh flowers for the brim of his hat.

He would be back for more in a few days. And he would bring his family...

You Can Imagine The Eye Rolling That Went on Back in the Kitchen

Sometimes people who come into restaurants are pretty strange. Sometimes they don't quite think about what they are saying or doing (see also: part 1). Sometimes they drive you crazy. Sometimes they drive you to drink. Sometimes they make you wonder how anyone is passing elementary school these days.

Earlier this week I had a family that made me wonder that. It was the mother who concerned me most.

They sat themselves. I brought menus. I took down drink orders. I filled the drink orders. I asked what they'd like to eat.

"A hamburger with fries," the one boy said.

The mother pointed to the smaller boy. "And he'll have a cheeseburger with onion rings," she said. "I'll have the BLT."

I took down all the information, collected the menus, and returned to the kitchen to hang my order. A few minutes later, after the order had been cooked, I stacked the plates on my arms and delivered it. As I was setting the plates down in front of the three of them, the mother's face grew concerned.

"What's that?" she asked. She pointed to the onion rings on her son's plate. They were sitting in a neat pile next to the cheeseburger.

"Onion rings," I said. I wondered what the deal was. I wondered just who on earth couldn't identify a junk food staple like onion rings when they were placed in front of them.

"We didn't order onion rings," she said.

Even though I can occasionally get something about an order incorrect, I knew this was not one of those times. I'd written down everything they'd said just as they'd said it.

"You said your son wanted a cheeseburger with onion rings," I said.

She blinked at me. She looked confused. She pursed her lips and then her face lit up in the way faces have when something has dawned upon them. "Ohhhh," she said. "No!" She laughed, like I was silly, like I was just a big goofy girl who didn't know anything. "Onion rings! Onion rings! I wanted some rings of onion on his burger."

I stared at her. "You mean you wanted a slice of onion on his burger?" I asked.

"Yeah!" she said brightly. "Some onion rings on his burger!"

I Like to Meddle

On Monday morning my brother showed up unannounced at the house. He's been doing that a lot lately, which doesn't make me all that happy because there have been several times where he's almost caught me pantsless, shirtless, or any sort of half-naked. I can't even imagine what my brother would do if he ever saw me half-naked. Probably some variety of what I'd do if I ever saw him half-naked, and that would involve a blunt object and spooning my eyes out with it.

But on Monday my brother had made the trip out here for two very specific reasons. One involved an old van one of his friend's aunt's had used in her carpet-installation business, a van that she'd given to Adam's friend, a van that Adam and his friends were determined to dismantle and turn into a field car that would be able to transport them and large amounts of their friends back to the cabin.

The other reason involved him coming into the diner to eat so he could check out the waitress I am determined to set him up with.

I'd given her notice, and she came to work with her hair impeccably straight-ironed. She had on good jewelry. She was jittery and excited. She stood in the back and wiggled up and down with anticipation.

When my brother breezed into the diner with his friends in tow, the waitress turned and high-tailed it behind the two-way mirror so she could watch Adam and his friends seat themselves in the very last booth along the wall.

"Oh my God oh my God oh my God," she said. She was whipped into hysterics. "He is so hot, so hot, so hot!"

I made a face and went out with a stack of menus for my brother and his boys. My brother had chosen to sit on the side of the back booth that faced the wall. His entire view during dinner would be of the turquoise and hot pink wall that is decked out with pictures from the '50s.

"Hi boys," I said. I doled out the menus and then hit my brother on his fuzzy head. "Are you a moron?" I asked. "Don't you think you should be on the other side of the table, so she can see you and you can see her? Don't you want to get a look at her?"

His only look at her had occurred a few days earlier, when I'd sent a picture to his cell phone.

"Oh," my brother said, "yeah. I guess. Okay. Switch with me, Tim."

Tim switched. I took drink orders. I went back to the kitchen, where the waitress was leaning against the steel counter and looking like she'd gone into heat.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Fine," she said, fanning herself.

I told her I had a plan, and it was brilliant. I'd take the drinks to the boys, get their order, hang it, and then she could help me bring it out. That's when we'd do the official introduction. I'd make her take his food--a beef on weck, just like I'd predicted--and then they could lock eyes and touch fingers and feel the sizzle of something good starting.

She said okay, okay, that was good, that was great, that was wonderful. She said she was really nervous, though. She didn't know if she could do it.

I told her she could, that she was a pro, that it was going to be fine.

Then I went back and told my brother the plan. "I'm making her bring your food out," I said. "Okay? So she's going to hand you yours, and then I'm going to do the introduction. How do you feel about that?"

My brother told me that was good, that was great, that was wonderful. He said he was pretty nervous, though. He thought he might act like an ass.

I told him that it was entirely possible that he might, but he should try to keep it under control.

"Don't tell her I'm nervous, okay?" he asked.

"No, I totally won't," I said. Then I went back into the kitchen and told her he was really nervous.

"That's so cute," she said. "You didn't tell him I was nervous, did you?"

"No way," I said, and it went on like that for another half an hour. I ran small messages between them, and then, finally, the food came up.

"I don't think I can do this!" the waitress said as she balanced Adam's beef on weck in her palm.

"You can," I said. "You can."

And she did. She followed me out, placed his beef in front of him without incident, and then stood there as I introduced her and they said hey, hi, how are you.

After she disappeared to tend to her own tables, I turned back to my brother and raised my eyebrows. "Huh? Huh?" I asked. "She's cute, right?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "She's really cute," he said. "I like her hair. It's amazing. And her smile is possibly the best smile I've ever seen. But don't tell her that."

And that was one thing I didn't immediately go back and tell her--mainly because I figured that's something he can hang onto, something he can use to impress her later on down the line.

So, I think it went well. More than well. Later that night, we all somehow ended up standing in my driveway and letting Adam swing open the doors to the ex-carpet-hauling van that was now outfitted with several folding chairs ("Eventually," my brother said, "we want to have a couch in here."). The cute waitress looked wary, but she climbed up and into the van, she let my brother drive us over the bumpy path that leads to the cabin. She let him show her the warm beer, the outhouse, the inside of the cabin. I was the one who pointed out the cabin's finer points: the stacks of porn (which have doubled since I was last there), the rustic antler decorations, the moldy bearskin rug.

Much later, after we'd been sitting around the fire for a good long time, my cell phone blinked. I had a text message. I opened it and found a message from the waitress, who was sitting two chairs down from me.

The message said, I want to bone your brother.

And when I looked up from my phone and at the waitress, she was staring intently into the fire's flames, trying not to laugh. And I had to get up and pour myself another peach vodka-ginger ale to keep myself from throwing up right then and there.

Cat, Cupid

(1.)

Tonight after ordering drinks, a lady at one of my tables looked up at me and smiled. "I have sort of a silly question for you," she said. "Can I ask it?"

"Sure," I said. I thought it would be a silly question about the food, and I was prepared for whatever she was about to throw at me.

"Well," she said, "we're traveling. We've got this cat, and it's in the car. A kitten, really. It's in a carrier and all, but we hate to leave it out there. Do you think we could just bring the cat in the restaurant while we eat?"

I blinked. Then I blinked again. I was thinking, Oh. My. God. And then I had to take a minute out of my life to explain to these people why they couldn't bring their cat into a restaurant. I will never get that minute or those words back.


(2.)

One of the waitresses at work--this would be the one who likes to walk around the kitchen with her white shirt hitched up so the boys can see her boobs, the one who finds any excuse to use the word bone as a verb, to use the phrase ho-bag as a term of endearment--was discussing her man problems. Everyone at this place has man problems (or, if they are a dishwasher or a cook, girl problems), but this waitress's boy problems are impressive in their problematic-ness.

"I'm becoming a lesbian," she announced last week. "Seriously. That's it. I'm through. I'm a full-on lesbian now."

But this week she seems mellowed. She seems almost ready for another boy. So I announced that my brother was single. Then I said something that I never expected to come out of my mouth.

"And he's not bad looking," I said. Admitting that was torture.

"He's pretty nice," I continued. "He's sort of a royal cranky bitch when he's hungry, but if you keep him fed, he's a pretty okay kid. Also, he's building a bar for our cabin. Not bad, huh?"

The waitress wanted to see a picture. I said okay. I texted my brother and told him to send a picture of himself immediately, which he did. The picture he chose to send was a picture where he is making a funny face, a surprised face. It was a goofy picture, but it showed him for who he is. I flipped the phone in the direction of the waitress.

"There," I said.

"OH MY GOD!" the waitress squealed.

"Oh no," I said.

"OH MY GOD!"

"Oh no."

The waitress started jumping up and down. "Oh my God," she said. "I think I just wet my pants! He's hot!"

"Okay, no. Stop. That's gross."

She ran out of the room, and we could hear her squealing in the other room.

"Listen," I said to the cooks and dishwashers, "I know he's not unfortunate looking, but that's a lot of fuss."

"He's cute," one of the cooks said.

"Blecch," I said.

The waitress launched back into the room. "Send him a picture of me!" she said. "Here, I'll send you one."

We sent it. We waited. I walked out to my tables, checked things over, came back behind the line. We looked at my inbox, and there was a message from my brother. Oh, it said, she is real cute.

There was more squealing then, but for some reason I found myself supporting it. I found myself even picking up the phone and calling my brother to see if he wanted to come out to the diner to meet this girl.

"He's nice," I said. "He's a good guy. He's a good friend." Each admission made me want to vomit a little more in my mouth, but I somehow refrained, and I somehow managed to work it so that sometime next week my brother will breeze into the diner for a milkshake and the waitress will appear from the back with her not-usually-done hair actually done (You'll have to tell me exactly which day he's coming in, she said. I'll need to actually do my hair. Unlike today. Here, I'll take it out of the ponytail. It won't move. Ready? Watch. See? Awesome, huh?) and she and her straight hair will woo my brother and bring him chicken wings or a beef on weck and they will live happily ever after.

Or until they get in each other's pants.

Lechery

At the restaurant, it's not just that one male cook who's foul-mouthed and sex-obsessed. It's also one of the waitresses (who routinely flashes the cooks and finds more reasons to use the word bone than you'd think were possible in a diner). It's also one of the ice cream boys (who likes to discuss porn and all the sex he will get--you know, eventually, after he finds a girl to take his virginity).

But it's also more than just the employees who engage in habitual sexual harassment. It's the customers, too. Well, some of them. Not so much the church-going ladies or the over-taxed mothers who look like they're two seconds from snapping the heads of their children clean off. Mostly, it's the old men. And, last night, for me, it was two old men, two regulars who tromp into the diner at least once a day for coffee, toast, a bowl of soup, or a grilled cheese sandwich.

These men love me. They are my at-work boyfriends. They call me by name, tell me jokes, press filmy dollars into my hands, call me over to their table just to talk. I fill their coffee, smile, laugh when it's appropriate. They say, "Will you be here later when we come back?" They say, "I'm so glad you're here." They say, "You're a such a pretty girl."

Last night they took their chatter to another level, though. The compliments took a turn after I delivered their coffee and cream.

"Have you gentlemen figured out what you want tonight?" I asked. I meant food. They, however, were not thinking about food.

"How about you?" one of them asked.

"Well now," I said, "that's definitely not on the menu."

"It should be," the other one echoed.

I knew I had to get ahold of the situation ASAP, or else this was going to turn into something vaguely gross.

"Let me rephrase," I said. I tapped my pen on my waitress pad. "What would you gentlemen like to eat tonight?"

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized my mistake. Here I was dealing with two old men--who clearly still have the mind frame they had in high school--and I gave them that to work with.

"Well," the older-looking one said. He gestured toward my apron--slung low over my hips--and waggled his eyebrows. "You know," he said. He winked.

"FOOD," I said. "FOOD. Dinner? A sandwich? Some soup?"

They placed their orders then--and indeed it was a soup and sandwich kind of night--and I ran back to the kitchen to tell everyone what had happened.

"Well," one of the cooks said, "it looks like you're going to be getting a good tip tonight. And you won't even have to flash your customers like the other girls do."

Two Weeks

Today marks two weeks since I started waitressing again. In those two weeks, I've remembered one very important thing about working this kind of job: it's way easier to make friends with the boys than it is the girls.

The boys at work are very sweet to me. They leave flowers on my car, they buy me dinner, they bring bottles of my favorite pop to work, they ask for and then read my thesis and book about Russia. They want to discuss my stories and characters. They say, "I don't think the character in this story is as bad as he thinks he is." They ask, "What are you writing now?" And when I tell them I'm writing a story about a brother and sister, a story where the brother has always been so good and perfect and then something happens to change him, to make him an awful man, that's when the boys at work want to know if they can help, if they can illustrate the story for me:


Caption: You stupid bitch!

I tell them we're going to make a very good team.

Don't Get The Ice

Tonight at work I watched one of the dishboys climb up on a stepladder to peer into the ice container at the top of the pop machine. I watched him and thought, Huh. That's weird. Why is he doing that? It's our job. He must really be bored.

That's when the dishboy looked at me. He smiled his best smile from underneath his low-slung hat. "Hey, Jess?" he said. "Would you run and get me some ice, please?"

He said it so sweetly that I couldn't say no. Sure I could go get him some ice. But I still wasn't convinced that what he was doing was virtuous, and I told him so. "I swear to God," I said, "if someone is hiding in that ice cooler, I am going to come back here and beat the crap out of you."

Last week when I started, one of the waitresses took me aside and warned me that if ever one of the cooks, dishboys, or ice cream boys asked me to go get them ice when it looked like they were perfectly capable of doing it themselves, then I should go with caution. The ice cooler, which is in one of the back rooms, is pretty big. When lowish on ice, you can fit a human body in there no problem. A few minutes of waiting in ice-cold is worth it to these boys just the second they see the look on the person's face, just as soon as they hear the person scream. "They do it all the time," the waitress told me. "Just watch out."

So I walked back to the ice cooler. I checked the other back rooms to make sure everyone was accounted for. I couldn't find one boy--the ice cream boy--so I headed over to the ice chest with tremendous care. I steeled myself for whatever was going to happen just as soon as I grabbed the handle and opened.

I put my hand on the handle. I thought, Don't be afraid if a teenage boy pops out and screams Boo! I thought, Also, try not to pee your pants if a teenage boy pops out and screams Boo! After all, I come from a long line of women who have trouble controlling their bladder in certain dramatic moments, and while I've never had a problem, I'm figuring it's only a matter of time until someone scares the hell out of me so bad that I have to start wearing Depends.

I eased the handle back and slowly opened the door. That's when a teenage boy pushed off a stack of bagged ice and said Boo!

"Bastards!" I hissed. I ran back to the kitchen. "Oh that's it," I said. "That's it! You're all dead!"

The dishboy shook his head. "No, no, no," he said. "Sssh. Don't say anything. Let's get some more people. Okay? Okay?"

I crossed my arms and glared at him, but I kept my mouth shut. In fact, I kept my mouth shut the entire time as the dishboy took his station again--climbing to the top of that step ladder--and called out to someone else. "Hey," he said. "Do you think you could run and get me some ice, please?"

And then he and I were both quiet, waiting for the eventual yelling and slamming to occur--this time the person being scared had the presence of mind to get back at the ice cream boy by locking him into the freezer for several minutes--and during that silence I tucked silverware into precise napkin triangles and thought, This isn't the worst way to spend an afternoon.

I'm Hoping "Where's My Coleslaw, Bitch?" Will Become a Top 40 Smash

Last night I dreamed I was playing Scrabble with the cast of Seinfeld, that I was shopping for Chinese dolls, that I was locked in a showroom with vacuum salesmen. Normally I would've woken up thinking What the hell? but this morning it seemed just right, exactly perfect, and not so strange at all.

The last week of my life has been bizarre. I have been asked to give lap dances. I have served heaps of fish frys. I have walked over the Rainbow Bridge into Canada. I have seen a stripper launch her naked body onto a pole and pretend-whisper to one of her stripper friends who is sitting in front of the stage, I am so wasted right now! I have seen a cat break its way out of a cat trap outside a bar at 1:00 AM. I have had flowers left on my car while I was at work.

There have been moments over the last few days where I've felt very much like this is a joke, that someone must be taping this, maybe making a Lifetime movie of my life, or at least scouting material for a campy new musical, something that will be all pink and glitzy, where Bebe Neuwirth plays a small-town girl turned college instructor turned summertime waitress who sings vibrant numbers like "Ain't This a Kick in the Pants?" and "Where's My Coleslaw, Bitch?: A Love Song from Customers" and "There's Something Sexy (About an Apron Full of Singles)."

It's hard to process everything--all the new people and things--and it's hard to get over the comparisons--between the old restaurant and the new; between my grad school life and post-grad school life--but I'm working on it. I'm trying to find my footing in my new routine. I'm trying to find words to write, trying to finish my book, and trying very hard not to panic because a lot of this feels familiar, like I've lived this summer before. It wouldn't be the worst thing, I suppose, to have a deja vu summer, but I just have to talk myself into it. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Slowly and surely, I can talk myself into it.

First Day

The following things happened to me during my first five hours at this new restaurant:

(1.)

Ten minutes after I arrived and was introduced to the boy who would train me in, watch me wait tables, and examine my general skill level, another new waitress who was just finishing up her lunch shift said, "So, do you have a boyfriend?"

I said no, I definitely did not.

She turned to the boy who was training me in. "And do you have a girlfriend?" she asked.

He said no, he did not.

The new waitress nodded sagely. "You two should date," she announced. "You'd be good together. I can tell just from watching you."

"It's been ten minutes," I said.

"I can tell," she said.

"I'll keep that in mind," I said.


(2.)

During a slow period where I was washing down the front doors that were smeared with grubby hand prints belonging to zealous children who couldn't wait to get inside and have a sundae, one of the cooks--big, sweaty--ambled out from behind the line, leaned on the counter, and whistled at me.

"That," he said, "is a fine ass."


(3.)

When I went back into the kitchen, the cook gave me a big grin. "Sorry about before," he said. "Your butt just looked really nice."


(4.)

An hour later the cook came out of the kitchen again, this time with a twist-tie he'd fashioned into a ring. There was a hunk of broccoli in the spot where a diamond would normally go. "Will you marry me?" he asked.

"Don't worry," one of the waitresses said. "He does this to everyone."


(5.)

Two of the guys asked if I wanted to go have a drink with them after our shifts were over.

"Sure," I said.


(6.)

Somewhere before close, the cook came out and looked at me very seriously. "Do you want to go to a strip club with us? We're going to throw this kid--" here he throws an arm around one of the other boys--"a going-away party before he goes to Iraq. We're taking him to Canada for the strippers."

"Uhm," I said.

"Are you the type of girl who participates at strip clubs?" he asked.

"She's a professor!" one of the other boys said. "What if one of her students saw?"

"So what?" the cook asked. He leaned against the pop machine and waggled his eyebrows. "Hey," he said to me. "If I gave you twenty bucks, would you give me a lap dance?"

~~~

I think, I think, I think I'm going to have a lot to write about this summer.

The Horrors of Waitressing

Tomorrow I start my new waitressing job. I don't dread the actual work of it, just the social aspect. It's hard to be the new girl. It's hard to break in, to become one of the crowd, the group. It'll take me time to suss everyone out, to understand who is good, who is bad, who is beloved, who is hated.

Being the new girl sucks.

But there's a part of me that's mildly looking forward to getting back into it all. I always loved waitressing--probably because I think good waitressing has a lot to do with good flirting. It's about knowing your stuff and being prompt and courteous, too, but it's also a lot about being a charmer, a witty little thing, a girl who smiles and laughs at all the right times. And because I'm the type of girl who is consumed with making people like her--a girl who gets really upset when people don't like her for whatever reason--waitressing is a really good job for me. It, like teaching, has roots in performance. It's a job where the people doing it are on display, are showing off. Deep down, those people are cold and clammy and thinking, Like me, like me, oh, please, just like me!

But as much as a person can want and try for that, sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes there are people who will be hateful, rude, and downright mean. And I'm trying to remember that, trying to get myself back into the proper state of mind before I drive to the new restaurant tomorrow. I'm cataloguing my best and worst times, weighing them, reminding myself that the scales tip more toward the good, and that's what I have to keep in the front of my thoughts at all times.

Still, it's not easy to forget some of the worst memories.

The first (and only) time I was yelled at by a customer came during my second summer at the restaurant. I'd had fine luck up until that point, but I'd seen some other waitresses--seasoned girls who'd been at it longer than I had--reduced to sobbing by cruel customers. The worst was on a busy Friday night, and the incident almost ground the whole place to a halt. The waitress--who was just an eensy thing, pleasant, irritatingly sweet with her customers--had a table of ten. It was a busy night, and fish frys were churning out of the kitchen at a head-spinning rate. Still, people had to wait. The place was packed. There was a two-page waiting list just to get seated. So it was only natural that everything was moving just a bit slower. But one of the men at this table of ten wasn't a fan of waiting. He wasn't a fan of the waitress's brightness when he was so hungry, when he had already waited so long. At first, after they'd gotten seated, he'd been pleasant enough. He listened with mild interest when his wife talked with the waitress about her "real" job--she was a social worker--and he ordered drinks for his entire party.

As far as everyone could tell, things were going fine, things were under control. But then all of a sudden, there was commotion. You could sense it even on the other end of the restaurant, where I was standing. When I got back to the waitress station, which was in a dark alcove in front of the kitchen, the waitress was heaving with sobs. The other waitresses were trying to put their arms around her, but she kept shaking them off.

"No!" she said. "No, no, no!" She shook her head so emphatically that some of her hair fell out of her slicked-back ponytail. She stormed into the kitchen doors, almost plowing into a dishboy. We watched as she kept walking straight past the line, past the cooks and salad preps, and out the back door. When we went out to find her, we saw her sitting on an overturned fruit salad bucket, furiously smoking a cigarette. Her hair was completely down now, and her face was bright red from the crying.

It turned out that the man who'd at first been so friendly was not so friendly at all. In fact, when he got impatient for his food, when he got angry about how much time he'd already had to wait just to get a table, he called the waitress over. He asked her what was taking so long, and when she gave him the honest answer (it was busy, the kitchen was backed up, there was only so much they could do) and asked if she could get him another drink while he was waiting, the man erupted in a spout of hate. He told her she was a horrible waitress, that she didn't know anything, that she was foolish and silly. Then he struck his final blow. "I can't believe you're a social worker," he spat out. "It's so obvious you'd be horrible at that job."

I give the waitress credit, though. She cried for a good five minutes, then dried her face, smoked one last cigarette, and went back in there like nothing ever happened. You could tell how badly she'd been crying, but she delivered their food, refilled their drinks, brought them more bread, and spoke only to the man's wife, who, she could tell, was hugely embarrassed about what happened.

Later that night, after the rest of the party had exited the restaurant for the car, the wife came back to the alcove and touched the waitress's shoulder. She told her everything her husband had said was untrue. She said the waitress was an extraordinary girl. She pressed an awful lot of money into her palm.

My incident with a yeller wasn't nearly as bad as that one, which threw the whole restaurant into a tizzy, the cooks and waitresses and busboys and dishboys and even the owner trying to calm the waitress, trying to figure out exactly what to do with a customer who belittled a girl in front of a full restaurant. But still, my incident was bad enough to etch it forever into my mind, so I will never forget exactly where these people were sitting, what they ate, and what they said to me.

It was a table of two. A husband and a wife. They were treating themselves. They'd come in for steak dinners.

It started on a sour note after I filled their drink orders and came back to see what they wanted to eat.

"I'll have the prime rib," the husband said.

I told him we didn't do prime ribs on Tuesday nights. It was a weekend thing, and I pointed to the note that explained that, which was written in bold print right above the menu's entries for the different prime rib cuts.

The man was not happy. "That's ridiculous," he said. "You should have it every night." He paused, sighed dramatically. "We'll need more time to think about it, then."

I apologized and gave them another few minutes before returning to see what they'd chosen.

The man wanted one of the 12 ounce steaks we featured, so I recorded how he wanted it done (medium-rare), what kind of potato he wanted (baked), and what kind of dressing he wanted on his salad (ranch, and no garbanzo beans or onions were to touch his salad).

When the wife ordered, she said she wanted the 10 ounce steak. There were two different 10 ounce steaks, so I asked if she meant the 10 ounce strip steak. "Yes," she said. I wrote it and her particulars (well-done, baked, Italian dressing) down on my pad and went on my way.

Later, when I delivered their dinners, the husband glared at me. "What," he asked, "is that?" He pointed to the steak on his wife's plate.

"A 10 ounce strip steak," I said. I thought maybe he was going to complain about its size, say that it couldn't possibly be 10 ounces.

"That's not what she ordered," he said.

"Yes, it is," I said. "She wanted a 10 ounce strip steak, well-done."

He looked at me like I was crazy, like I was a fool. "That," he repeated, "is not what she ordered."

The wife had developed a sudden interest in her flatware. She kept rearranging them in front of her.

"But it is," I said. "I even repeated it out loud, asked if it was correct, and she said yes." I looked at the woman, thinking she'd correct her husband because she knew what I was saying was right.

The man's face turned red. "This steak is not the steak my wife ordered!" he said, his voice now booming. Other tables stopped chewing and slanted their eyes in our direction so they could see how this would all shake out.

The wife finally spoke. "Actually, dear, it is what I ordered," she said.

"No, it's not!" he screamed, and her eyes immediately snapped back down to her plate. She held her breath, blinked her eyes rapidly.

I didn't know what to do. How do you handle a situation like that? I knew I was right, the person who ordered the dinner knew I was right, and yet I was being yelled at for it. So I did the only thing left to really do: I pandered.

"I'm sorry, sir," I said. "I just delivered what your wife ordered. If for some reason you are unhappy with it, I can take it back and get the cooks to make her another steak."

That's when he snapped. He told me he didn't come to a restaurant to have such awful service. He said when he dined out he expected to get what he ordered the first time he ordered it. He didn't want to have to wait around for another steak to be made. He wanted to know if I could understand that. "Or are you stupid?" he asked.

As much as I wanted to crack that man across the face for talking to me, not to mention his own wife, like that, I didn't. After all, his wife was staring down at her plate and looking like she was ready to cry. It was clear this wasn't a new thing. It was clear this was a trend, that he spoke for her, decided things for her, and ignored her on a daily basis. At that moment, I didn't want to make things worse for her.

I breathed. "I'm sorry, sir," I said. "I'll bring a new steak--whatever she wants--and get you some free drinks. What would you care for?"

"Oh, she'll eat the one she has," the husband snapped. "But bring her a chardonnay and bring me a whiskey."

I nodded. When I took a step back from the table, I realized the entire restaurant was staring at me. Everyone was wearing the exact same expression. The I'm So Sorry, But I'm Glad I'm Not You Right Now expression. The only person not wearing that expression was the bartender. She was a tough old broad, a woman who looked like she'd been around the block a few times, a woman who looked like she'd seen all the world's bullshit and tolerated absolutely none of it. Her expression was filled with rage. She was bristling, ready to launch from behind the bar and take the man up by his ear and throw him out the front door.

I retreated to the waitress station to punch in the drink order. The bartender came and stood next to me. "That's just bullshit," she said. "Absolute bullshit. Who does he think he is?"

I was concentrating on the computer. I was also trying not to cry. I'm not one to take getting yelled at lightly, and I've been known to turn on the tears for something as simple as a Campbell's soup commercial, so it was work to get those tears--which I could feel backloading behind my eyes--to stay put. I wasn't about to give that man the satisfaction. I wasn't about to let him see me cry.

"Want me to say something?" the bartender asked, which I loved her for. I loved the thought of her marching over to that table and giving the man a piece of her mind. I pictured her saying, You, sir, must have a very small penis. She'd been known to do things like that to mouthy bar customers. She was possibly the most badass woman I knew. She was the type of woman who not only would wear leather chaps, but look completely appropriate in them too.

"No," I said. "I've got it." I knew it was my turn to be badass, too, just in a more subtle way. I was going to go back to that table and pretend that I got treated that way every single day, that I was used to it, that it was no big thing, and he'd have to do something way worse to break me. It was clear, after all, that this man's hobby was breaking women. I could imagine he'd been breaking his wife down for years now, until she knew better than to talk or disagree or voice an opinion.

"Alright," she said, "but he says one more thing like that, and I'm bouncing his ass out on the pavement." She said it loudly, and I'm fairly certain he heard it.

But I gathered the drinks the bartender made, brought them over, and, later, even brought them a free piece of pie to split.

The man didn't say another cross word to me. He didn't look at me and only spoke if absolutely necessary, but he didn't raise his voice again. The wife did most of the communication from that point on, in a chirppy little voice that sounded like it was an effort just to get out.

I felt so sorry for her. I wanted for her to make a scene or something, to get up and leave the restaurant, leave him with those dinners and the bill. I wanted her to take the car and leave him stranded. I wanted her to go home, get the locks changed, and make him beg to be let back in. And then I wanted her to tell him he was never, ever, ever going to be let back in.

I knew that wasn't going to happen. I knew they would go home and it would be more of the same for that woman, for the rest of their lives.

But, luckily, you don't run into those people every day. Mostly it's people who are pleasant enough, polite, normal, nice. Some days you are even blessed with extravagantly nice people, like the group whose baby shower banquet I once worked. I was the only waitress on the party, and it was a lot of clearing and running around for one girl to do, and they knew it. At the end of the day, as I was breaking down their buffet and they were gathering up all the onesies and rattles and picture books the mother-to-be had accumulated, the two who had thrown the party came over and handed me a slim bank envelope filled with money. "You're a doll," they said. Inside the envelope was two hundred dollars.

There was also the lady who came into the restaurant once a week and tipped forty dollars, no matter what she had. It could've been a steak or a toasted cheese sandwich, but the tip was always forty dollars. "I remember," she said once, "what this is all like."

My favorite of the favorites, though, was a table who came in for a long lunch one Saturday afternoon. I'd had them before and loved them. There were two couples, friends who got together once a week to share a meal and gossip. They were crazy about this cheesy seafood pasta thing that got rolled out on the weekends, if ever there was seafood bisque leftover from the night before. The first time I served it to them, they gushed to me as if I'd been the one to make it. "Brilliant!" they said. "You're a brilliant girl!" They fussed over me as if I was just the best thing ever.

The next time I had them, they proclaimed I was their favorite waitress in the entire world, the nicest girl they'd ever had bring them food. As their meal came to a close that time, one of the men, who, earlier, had been grilling me about my course of study in college and my ultimate dream job (which I told him was to be a successful author), pushed his empty plate aside and flipped over his placemat. He drew a pen out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. "I'd like your autograph," he said. "We all know you're going to be very famous someday."

I thought that was lovely. I took his pen and scrawled my name across the back of the place mat. "There," I said. "Maybe that will make you a little money in twenty years." I laughed, but he seemed very serious about it all. He folded the autograph into a precise square and slipped it into his pocket.

"We'll never forget you," he said.

Of course they threw that place mat away as soon as they got home, and of course they have since forgotten me, but it is nice to know there are people out there who are willing to behave that way--so sweetly, so kindly. It's nice to know there are people out there who can very well make your day in the moment you least expect it to be made.

Thanks for Nothing, Terminal Degree. (Just Kidding. I Still Love You, Baby.)

Yesterday I told Diana that finding a summer job was going surprisingly slow, and the hunt was surprisingly difficult. I told her I thought this was God's little way of telling me I'd been riding my high horse when I started the job search and that I needed to be bucked right the hell off of it.

When I first started this summer job search, I said both to myself and out loud that it would be a piece of cake, that it would be no big shake, that I would be able to find waitressing work with no problem. Even if it came to it, I could probably go back to my old place of employment because they loved me there, they adored me, and they'd take me back in a hot second.

It turned out nothing was that easy.

In a fit of desperation a week or so ago, I turned into the driveway of a local sit-down pizza place because their sign had broadcast SERVERS NEEDED for the last month. It wasn't really the type of place I had in mind. It wasn't really the type of place I wanted to work for. But still I walked inside, asked to speak to someone about the needed servers, and was referred to the manager.

The manager made me wait five minutes just to speak with him. He took me into the closed-off section of the dining room, which is decorated with wood paneling and filmy watercolors circa 1972, and he started asking me questions. He wanted to know where I'd gone to school, what I'd studied, what kinds of jobs I'd held, what kind of waitressing experience I'd had.

When I listed the places I'd waitressed before, he nodded but seemed unimpressed. Then he sighed and shook his head.

"I don't know," he said. He sucked air in through his teeth, the universal signal for This is gonna be a close call. "See, I'd have no problem hiring you if you'd come to me maybe three months earlier. But you're not really worth it now."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Well," he said, "you see, it would take at least three or four months to get you trained in, and you only want to work for three months before you go back to your other job. I just don't see how that's worth it."

Three or four months? I looked at the man and thought, Surely you must be joking. This wasn't a four star restaurant. It was a quasi-Italian joint that served up plates of spaghetti to senior citizens and families with three screaming children who would've been thrown out of any other restaurant. When I was hired on at my last waitressing gig, we were all under the assumption that it was going to be a three month stint, and no one was worried about getting me trained in before those three months were up--and this was a restaurant that did banquets, had a full bar, and served things like Surf & Turf, not chicken bombers and french fry baskets. I wanted to tell this manager to give me an apron, show me the pop machine, introduce me to the cooks, and let me be on my way.

But instead I just smiled. "I understand," I said.

"You have pretty okay qualifications, though," he told me as some sort of peace offering. "How about I take down your name? I'll give you a call if I think we can work something out."

So I said sure and signed my name to a legal pad that was thick with the names of at least fifteen other women who must've come by and had similar experiences with this man. Just looking at those names--names like Ethel and Betty, and even names like Ashley and Lacey--I knew he'd turned away his fair share of the two best subsets of waitresses out there: the grizzled old-time waitresses who remember fondly the days when they could take their smoke breaks inside the restaurant and the cutesy just-graduating-from-high-school numbers who wear their hair in peppy blond updos and decorate their name tags with hearts and daisies. What else, I wondered, could this man be looking for?

But he was already herding me out the door. "It was a real pleasure to meet you," he said, and shook my hand. "No, I mean that. A real pleasure."

But today I had a little more success. Today I went on a job interview and actually landed a job. The head waitress who hired me didn't seem concerned that she wouldn't have enough time to train me in or that I wouldn't be able to grasp the nuances of the business in three full months. She just seemed to care that I knew I couldn't wear open-toed shoes or have my hair in my face. I told her sure, I was used to it, I knew the routine. I'd done this for five years of my life, after all. I said I was ready to give it another go--a lie, but a necessary one.

As I was gathering my things--which, now, included employment paperwork to be filled out and returned next week when I come for my first shift--she took one last look at my application. "I was looking at this the other day when the owner was in the room," she told me, "and I said to him, 'I think this has to be wrong. This girl is way too qualified to work here.'"

She laughed, so I laughed, even though I wanted to run back into the kitchen and jab myself with one of the biggest knives I could find.

"But, seriously," the head waitress continued, "I'm assuming this is just a summer thing, right? You'll be wanting to go back to school in the fall?"

I think she thought when I listed the university at which I work she must have confused that and thought I was going on to get a PhD because it was already listed quite plainly in front of her that I had both my BA and MFA. "Well," I said, "I'm not a student."

"You're not?" she asked.

"No. Actually, I teach at the university."

That's when she fanned herself with my application, like she'd been hit with a tidal wave of oppressive heat. "Oh," she said. "Oh. Well. You're definitely too qualified for this job. But I'm looking forward to working with you."

And my heart broke a little bit right then and there, standing in that cramped and disorganized office. I was feeling awful and nauseous and like I needed to have myself a good cry on the way home, but I was also feeling repulsed for feeling that way. What a brat, I thought as I drove the winding roads home, thinking about all the times over the summer I would drive that route, stinking of fish and grease. What a snobby, snobby brat.

But this is what it is, and it's unlikely that it will change, so I'll take my lumps. After all, a girl as snobby as me probably deserves them.