My short story, "Waitress," won the Women Who Write 2012 International Short Prose Contest and will appear in Calliope later this year.
Waitress
By ten o'clock Saturday night, Ray and I are the only staffers left at The Cap'n Jack. We stand in the stark fluorescent light of the galley kitchen, looking through garlands of fishing net into the darkened restaurant, where Kath sits smoking a cigarette and counting the day's receipts as her father watches from the giant sign in the driveway. The teak tables have been wiped down and covered in sailcloth. The squat ketchup bottles have been married so they will remain eternally full. The knotted rope coasters are stacked on the bar and Kath has locked away top-shelf liquors to prevent underage waitresses from supplementing our tips. I don't earn as much as the other girls, so each time Kath hands me the slim stack of bills it feels like the finally tally of my failure.
I have graduated from my father's A-list private college and was supposed to get a real job, but there are no real jobs. So I am waiting tables, which everyone tries to pretend is quaint and down to earth after a $200,000 education but which in reality is depressing and a bit scary. I can't even manage to turn this waitressing job into something more, the way my mother did, though you're not supposed to hope your daughter will marry rich any more. Or you're not supposed to talk about it. Either way, I'm already rich, so there's nothing left to hope for. Instead I am saving for a car that I will drive away from these disappointments into a future I can't picture yet.
Kath tells me I am a bad fit with the rest of the staff, but she keeps me on because of my mother, who worked here every summer of her college career. They are one big, happy family, returning to the Cape year after year with such unwavering loyalty that I wonder if Kath has laced their virgin daiquiris so they see the place the way it was when Kath's dad opened it, sleek and modern and new. They don't see what I see: a run-down seaside restaurant serving flash-frozen fish from Canada to droves of happily duped tourists who have come to celebrate some bygone idea of summer. They're so deluded it almost cheers me up.
I start making clams casino, wrapping the slippery iodine bodies in strips of congealing bacon while Ray sprays down the last of the cooking pots. The ancient chrome washer blows off steam in great gauzy cascades as dishes rotate through its caustic stomach. We've turned up the radio on the windowsill so we can hear the baseball game over the mechanical roar. Papelbon, the closer, has just entered the game for the Red Sox. The first two batters strike out swinging.
"Five bucks says he gets the next guy," shouts Ray. He is pre-med at U Mass Dartmouth. Each summer he works three jobs to make up for the money he loses when he’s in school. He starts each morning with a shift at his parents' convenience store, spends his day landscaping, and ends here in the kitchen with me. I envy his work ethic, his certainty about where it all will lead. This job is my first ever and it's all I can do to keep from getting fired.
"Who's the next guy?"
"Who cares?" He mops his face with the hem of his tank top, revealing a soft, fleshy stomach the color of caramel. "Take a chance."
"I can't bet if I don't know who he's up against."
"Now or never. Five bucks." Ray shoots me with the water gun until the front of my shorts is soaked.
"Five bucks!" I cry and chuck a raw clam at him. It hits the wall behind him and slides down, leaving a slimy white trail.
"Whoever he is, I hope he throws better than you do."
Ray drops his water gun, I wipe my hands on my despised Welcome Aboard apron, and together we listen to the announcer call the at-bat. I think I can hear the ball hit the glove each time, though it is likely just static. Papelbon strikes out the last batter.
"Game over." Ray does a victory lap around the dishwasher, circling back to pluck five soft, wrinkled bills – money I had plans for, money I can't afford to lose -- from my fingers. Even though he's been working since six am, Ray is helpful, fun, and easy-going. Kath doesn't hate Ray the way she hates me.
When the clams are chilling in the walk-in freezer and the pots are hanging from their hooks over the stove, Ray and I pull the door out behind us and walk across the street to the beach. We sit on the rotting wooden stairs and smoke the joint I've stolen from the cigar box under my brother's bed. With our lungs full of smoke, we look out across the water to the rambling beach houses crowning the opposite shore. They look ancient and knowing, with their weathered shingles and fresh white trim. I wonder if Kath looks out on these houses and thinks of my mother, who married into such wealth from the same humble beginnings.
My parents had met, of course, at The Cap'n Jack.
My father—his lean frame freed of its blue banker's suit, his skin browned and salted from a day on the water—dined on sole. My mother, ever confident, noted his seaworthiness and asked for a sail. She didn't figure that their journey would end across the river in his family’s big old house. But it did, and as a result, I have spent my childhood summers looking staring down The Cap'n Jack, waiting for my turn to show my mother that I am every bit the girl she was. Only it turns out I am not.
Ray kisses the side of my head and lets his mouth linger there, his lips warm from the smoke.
"No one should own a beach," I tell him. The ocean comes and goes, lapping at the edge of the stairs and spraying foam up onto our legs.
"Easy for you to say. Beach owner.” Ray runs his hand along my salty thigh.
"Don't you think there's something sad about it?" I gesture to the hard-packed sand studded with glistening shells. "It's like countries claiming airspace or farming the ocean."
"I think the people with beaches are the only ones who worry about it." Ray moves his arms up my waist and pulls me close. "If it's so wrong, why don't you do something?"
It's the question I've been asking myself all summer as I contemplate my title: waitress. The girl who waits. For what? I wonder. But now that the usual avenues are blocked –- no entry-level consultancy or pr post for me; even my father's silver-spoon bank is botched -- I can only drive and hope the future comes into view.
"You are all talk, no action." Ray smiles slyly, smoke leaking out the corners of his mouth.
He lays out the dare and I kiss him with an open-mouth. Before he can unhook my bra, I slide my hands up his shirt and run them over his stone-smooth skin, feeling his body give in gentle puckers at my touch. Most girls won't tell you that they like softness in a man. But I do. We are all vulnerable underneath our hard shells.
When I arrive at four the following afternoon, an hour before we open for the last night of the summer, Kath is on the warpath.
"Who forgot to prep the salads?" she shouts.
Kath knows it is me, it is always me, but she likes to put on this show for the other waitresses, tan, pony-tailed girls smelling of coconut oil who are still wearing their bikinis underneath their uniforms. I get bored at the beach so I ride my bike along the rail trail from Chatham to Welfleet, which leaves my back red and my stomach pale, like a crab.
"It was me.”
I leave the table where we are folding the napkins. Mine are always the most beautiful, knife-pleated and jaunty, while the other girls' slouch and sag. But that's not the sort of thing that counts with Kath.
I try to pass through the swinging door into the prep kitchen, but Kath blocks my way. She is short but wide, a human jersey barrier.
"Last chance.” She growls in my ear. "I need one more big weekend and I won't have you ruining it."
Our faces are so close that I could kiss her. I almost want to, to see what she would do. She is actually quite pretty — with her natural blonde hair pulled back in a knot to showcase her heart-shaped face and blue nickel eyes — but I can't get past her personality. I'll leave it to someone else to try to love her.
"It was so late,” I explain. “The clams took forever."
"Ray managed to get everything done."
That's because the girls help him, I want to say, so he'll by them beer. Which he hasn’t since we started dating, another strike against me. But Kath would think it is only right that I am left to chop salad for 400 while Bart the bartender makes real strawberry daiquiris for the other girls, yet another storied Cap'n Jack tradition.
I flee to the walk-in freezer and fill my arms with purple-skinned onions and iceberg lettuce. I let them roll across the aluminum prep counter, thundering like bowling balls. Ray sticks his head in from the main kitchen.
"Need help?" He wears his Sox cap backwards. His dark curls stick to his forehead like seaweed.
I wave him off. "Don't even think about it."
The last thing I need is Kath coming in here to find Ray doing my job.
Ray strokes the back of my neck, like I'm a dog that needs soothing. "You've got to learn to roll with it, baby. Not everyone is going to love you."
"They all love you." With a cleaver, I cut the iceberg heads in half, again and again, until the lettuce is shredded in limp, watery strands. Then
"They don't know me. They love the idea of me. Hardworking brother."
"Well, they hate the idea of me." I whack the onions into lacey circles of uneven width. The smell pinches my nose and sets my eyes to water. I pause to wipe my eyes.
Through the rigging, I can see Kath and the girls dancing around the room with their curvy pink glasses held high. Towering, balding Bart, in his gold-braided captain's hat and Jimmy Buffett t-shirt, turns up the Beach Boys "Fun, Fun, Fun" and strums his air guitar. It is just as my mother had described. For the millionth time, I wish I could be more like her; easy-going, able to fit in with the crowd. Then I would out there with the other girls, rallying around Kath like lost members of her tribe. Instead I stand watching from the kitchen, wishing they would trip and spill their drinks. Even Ray, whispering late night plans in my ear, can't keep me from feeling left out.
"You forgot this." He holds up the half-smoked joint.
"Save it for me. I’m going to need it.” I push his hand closed, fingers over palm like a clamshell. Then I turn and kiss Ray there in the kitchen. With my eyes closed, I can hear the fluorescent light buzzing overhead and the faint pull of the ocean in the distance. Maybe he is consolation enough.
The music stops. The door swings open. I should have known better.
"Stop kissing and clean up! Get out there! We have customers!"
Kath is red-faced and fuming, holding a bouquet of empty daiquiri glasses before her like a drunken bride.
"Get that dishwasher going. These glasses need to be clean. Salads! More salads!"
Ray and I watch her careen around the kitchen like an untied balloon losing its air. She throws the glasses into the sink and miraculously none of them break. Kath ties on an apron and starts washing out the pink foam herself, then stops and runs into the walk-in freezer.
"Clams casino! For everyone! On the house!"
She is about serve them cold when Perry, the been-there-done-that grill cook, emerges from behind the heat lamps and pulls the tray into the oven. "Let's cook 'em, first, shall we?"
This comment knocks Kath back to earth. Ray pours her a glass of water.
"What's that?" Kath points at a piece of napkin caught in the plastic floor mats that I am supposed to roll up and mop underneath each night.
"It was only the salads I forgot. I did the floors, I swear.” But then I realize the napkin is our joint.
"What the hell?" Kath picks up the joint and pockets it. Then she turns to me. "I would fire you right now, but I don't have time for this shit. All I'm asking for is one good night. Is that too much to ask?"
"Why do you assume it's mine?"
"You're going to try to tell me this belongs to him?" Kath tosses her head back and laughs. "I can't believe your Kitty's girl. Do you realize your mother holds the record for most consecutive summers?"
"That was thirty years ago. Who cares?"
Kath flinches as if I've struck her. She cares, of course. If The Cap'n Jack is one episode in my mother's charmed life, it is Kath's whole existence. She looks at me—long limbs, prim nose, dark ponytail curled against my neck like a question mark—and sees my mother. Somehow Kath is still waiting for her charm, her candor, her ready smile, her we're-all-in-this-together gusto. She is again disappointed.
"I hope you're a little nicer to the customers than you are to me." Kath smoothes her bun and pinches her cheeks until they turn pink, readying herself for her return to the dining room.
"They make it easier."
"Where is it written it should be easy?" she says, then yells into the kitchen. "Perry? How are those clams?"
Perry slides a plate of clams under the heat lamps. Kath garnishes the frothy, bubbling shells with lemon and loads them onto a tray. She disappears through the door to the dining room, which will swing back and forth in a steady rhythm throughout the night as we serve up the summer's last suppers to the tourists filling the dining room. They savor the sweet corn on the cob, order the whole lobster instead of the tail, and save room for ice cream because this night will have to last all winter.
Later that night, Ray and I are alone in the kitchen again, closing up. Out front in the restaurant, Kath smokes the last of our joint and counts out the till. I can tell by her face that the news is not good.
"It's not your fault.” Ray has left the dishwasher unattended and stands behind me, pressing his warm stomach into the small of my back. He smells of beer batter and lemon. I know he is smiling, but he isn't making me feel any better. "The world is changing."
"I know," I say. "But I don't understand how."
I feel like a bad omen, a bellwether of Kath's misfortune. If she can't befriend Kitty's girl, the end must be near. I wonder for the millionth time if there was a way I could have made myself fit in.
The dishwasher emits an angry hiss. Ray squeezes my elbow and leaves me to watch Kath smile ruefully as she pulls the stack of worn bills and receipts through her fingers again and again, stopping now and then for a drag from the joint, losing count and staring again.
After a while, she waves me over. She looks up, droopy-eyed and mellow. She hands me a short stack of bills, my last tips of the summer.
"You're a good kid, but a horrible waitress."
The finality of our exchange makes me reckless.
"You're a terrible boss."
"Maybe." She looks out the window, at the smiling sign in the driveway. "My dad was better at it. When he opened this place, there was nothing like it this far north. Dinner, dancing, ocean views. Like something out of a movie. Dean Martin came one night and asked for him by name." She turned toward the door, as if Dino might walk in now and save us all from the glamourless tedium that was our lives. Kath started as if she'd briefly dozed. "It's changed, of course, but people still love this place."
"They love the idea of this place."
"So? That counts for something. Isn't that why you’re here?"
Of course she's right. I'm here, just like she is, long after the others have gone, chasing ghosts, searching for a place that probably never existed.
"You're mother was amazing." Kath's bloodshot eyes flicker with light and I wonder if she wasn't a little in love with her, just like everyone else.
"Don't remind me."
She reaches for the joint and is about to lift it to her lips when she changes her mind and offers it to me. I take it and inhale, and for the first time all summer, I'm doing something without picturing my mother doing it better. As I exhale, I realize this is how I will invent myself; not from my mother's memory or my father's money, but out of smoke, out of thin air. I am overcome with a feeling of gratitude and love for her and her stupid restaurant. So I tell her what she wants to hear.
"This restaurant is legendary. People will remember it. "
Kath shines me one of the seesaw grins her father still mugs out the window behind her. I've finally said something right.
"They will, won't they?"
I nod. All we want is to be remembered, the way her Dad is, the way my mother is, like the Cap'n Jack itself.
But we won't be.
There will be no next summer. After thirty-five years, Kath will be forced to close. Tonight, she will drop the cash at the bank with hope in her heart, but come next June, the windows will be boarded up, the sign covered with plastic. Customers looking to relive their summer memories will have to look elsewhere.
By then, I'll be the proud owner of a 1999 Honda Accord, which will breakdown three times on the way to New Mexico where I'll relive my summer, waiting tables for another six months at cowboy dive before I land a job leading bike trips through the pit of the Grand Canyon, hoping my life will be waiting on the other side. I spend my days capped by a hard red helmet. At night, I read e-mails from Ray laced with anatomical descriptions of what he'd like to do to me, if we had time or were in the same place.
But tonight the air is cool as I mop the floor and listen to the ballgame while Ray dries the pots. The Red Sox are losing; there is no game to save. When Ray is done, we turn out the lights and walk across the street. I can smell burnt pinesap from the hasty bonfires the summer people have lit on the town beach. Instead of joining them, we sit on the split rail fence and stare back at the Captain Jack wondering how, or if, we'll remember it. I look over at Ray and wonder if we'll be telling the story of this summer to each other for the rest of our lives. I don't think so; but it's too soon to tell.
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