She started waiting tables after dropping out of college, because that’s what a year of pre-Psychology could do for her. An initial liability: She despised people as a concept. Her forehead was chronically knotted with silent rage as she poured beers, served food, delivered condiments, fumbled with plates, silverware, and napkins, and uttered pleasantries and small talk. But it was an uncomplicated relationship: Here’s the food, here’s the drink, leave the tip on the table and go someplace else.
She liked staying up late and sleeping while the insane people of the world bustled to and fro school, the office, the store. Blah. She’d see them when they sought escape over plates of fried food and pints of Irish stout. She played off her surliness as spunk and believed customers liked it, that it awakened latent memories of their mothers. Because after birth, except for the near-extinct June Cleaver types, most mothers grow resentful that they really only function as a food source.
Despite her unwillingness to indulge customers, and though she was not attractive, she would often cash in more tips than her friend Dora, a wispy doe-eyed blond, or Gina, a lean big-breasted brunette, both of whom smiled and bowed to every customer no matter how much of a jerk they were. She developed strong bonds with her co-workers and spent her non-working hours talking with them about work, either over the phone as she padded around her apartment in pajamas, or over meals at other restaurants. They’d bitch and speculate about customers and about each other, and she was good at this. She was a popular and feared person with whom to work.
She’d cash in her tips to the nearest twenty and collect huge wads of ones and bowls full of coins. Though she was chronically in debt to credit card companies, her family, and the IRS, she was comforted by possessing a large amount of petty money. Some days, she’d eschew her friends in order sit in her room and count her tips, sliding the one dollar bills rapidly between her hands, then piling identical stacks of coins all over the bedspread of her twin-sized mattress with a wobbly frame that collapsed the last three times she had sex. She was really good at simple math.
She was a waitress, and that was life. It was her life, clattering in a jar like a handful of pennies.
