But Morgan had her own way.
“Peel carrots away from you,” she said, demonstrating, “and cut off the ends about a quarter inch each. When feeding them into the processor, pause about every five seconds. It gives a finer shred.”
I peeled, chopped, and stocked. I learned the perfect, symmetrical way to stack coffee cups and sugar packets, to fold rags at a right angle against flat surfaces, clean side up. Morgan kept the counter area spick-and-span, each element in its place. When she was nervous, she went around correcting things.
“Take-out boxes on the left, cup lids on the right,” she’d shout, slamming them around as she restored order to her universe. “And spoons are handle side up, Isabel.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Isabel would say. When she was mad or just bored she purposely rearranged things just to see how long it took Morgan to find them. It was like a passive-aggressive treasure hunt.
That first lunch, when Norman and I had stopped to pitch in, was a constant blur of people and noise and food. Everyone was screaming at each other, Isabel and Morgan running past with orders, Norman flipping burgers and yelling things to Bick, the other cook, who stayed stonily quiet and cool the entire time. I shoveled ice like my life depended on it, answered the phone and took orders although I knew almost nothing about the menu, and messed up the register so badly it stuck on $10,000.00 and beeped for fifteen minutes straight before Isabel, in a fit of rage, whacked it with a plastic water pitcher. It was Us against Them, clearly, and for once I was part of Us. I didn’t really know what I was doing; I had to go on faith. So I just handed out my drinks and grabbed the phone when it screamed, wrapping the cord around my wrist and stabbing the pen Morgan had tossed me in my hair, the same way Isabel wore hers, and fought on.
“Last Chance,” I’d shout over the din. “Can I help you?”
And now, I was doing it every day.
At first, just walking up to a table full of strangers had scared me to death. I couldn’t even make eye contact, stuttering through the basic questions Morgan had taught me—What would you like to drink? Have you decided? How would you like that cooked? Fries or hush puppies?—my hand literally shaking as it moved across my order pad. It made me nervous to stand there so exposed, all of those people looking at me.
But then, on about my third table, I finally got the nerve to glance up and realized that, basically, they weren’t. For the most part, they were flipping through the menu, extracting Sweet’n Low packets from their toddler’s grip, or so lost in their own conversation that I didn’t even register: twenty minutes later they’d be flagging Isabel down, sure she was the one with their check. They didn’t know or care about me. To them, I was just a waitress, a girl with an apron and a tea pitcher; they didn’t even seem to notice my lip ring. And that was fine with me.
“In this job,” Morgan told me after a dinner rush, “You get a lifetime of experience every day. A crisis will crop up, worsen, come to a head and resolve itself all in fifteen to thirty minutes. You don’t even have time to panic. You just push through.”
She was right. For every burger overcooked, salad with the wrong dressing, or missing order of fries, there was a solution. Each time I got a little faster, a little stronger, a little bit more confident. Even Isabel was my ally.
“He’s an asshole,” she said over her shoulder after a grumpy tourist had snapped at me for giving him unsweetened tea instead of sweetened. “He’s on vacation, for God’s sake. He should lighten up!”
Finally, no matter how bad it got, or how rude anyone was, they were gone within an hour, tops. After what I was used to, this was nothing.
My mother, however, expressed concern. “Honey,” she said, her voice crackling through all those phone lines stretched across the ocean, “you should be having fun. You don’t need to work.”
“Mom, I like it,” I said, admitting to her what I was careful to remain blasé about at the restaurant: that I actually enjoyed it. I felt like I was holding my breath, fingers crossed, as if at any moment it could be over, just like that.
I assured my mother that I was not stuffing myself with onion rings and was running every day, which made her feel a little better. And I didn’t bring up Mira’s signs, or her bike, or her collection of broken furniture. My mother was prone to overreactions.
She was distracted, anyway, about to embark on a tour of Italy which included a huge, open-air aerobics session on a soccer field. Hundreds of women would be step-kicking and lunging along with her, and my little waitressing job would be soon forgotten.
But not by me. Because I had a friend.
“Colie,” Morgan said at the end of that first week, after we’d locked the door behind the last customer and mopped the floor. My feet hurt and I smelled like grease, but that night I’d made fifty bucks, all mine. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
I followed her out the back door and up some steps to the roof, which was flat and sticky and smelled like tar. All around us it was dark, with places lit up here and there: I could see the supermarket and the bridge, as well as one lone circling searchlight from the car dealership.
“Can you see that?” she said. “Right there.” She pointed over the trees to a bright spot nearby, close enough to make out if I stood at the very edge of the roof.
“It’s Maverick Stadium,” she said. “That’s where Mark used to play.” Mark, Morgan’s fiancé, was someone I already felt I knew. She talked about him constantly. How he wore boxers, not briefs. How he wanted three kids, two girls and a boy. How his batting average was improving and he’d had two home runs already this season even with a wrist injury. And how he’d asked Morgan to marry him three months ago, on his last night in Colby, as they sat together at the International House of Pancakes saying good-bye.
“I miss him so much,” she said. She kept a picture of him—he was literally tall, dark, and handsome—in her wallet. “Only three months left in the season.”
“How’d you meet him?” I asked her.
She smiled. “Here, actually. During a dinner rush. He was sitting at the counter and Isabel knocked a cup of coffee in his lap.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“No kidding. She was so slammed she just kept moving, so I cleaned it up and made all the apologies. He said it was okay, no problem, and I laughed and said pretty girls get away with anything.” She looked down, twisting her ring a bit so the diamond sat in the center of her finger. “And he smiled, and looked at Isabel, and said she wasn’t his type.”
There was a faint cheer from the stadium, and I saw a ball whiz over the far fence and out of sight.
“And so,” she went on, “I said, ‘Oh really? What is your type, exactly?’ and he looked up at me and said, ‘You.’ ” She grinned. “I mean, Colie, I’ve spent so long watching guys I liked go after Isabel. When we were in tenth grade, I spent a whole year in love with this guy named Chris Catlock. And then one night he finally called me. I almost died. But then . . .”
There was a another cheer from the stadium, followed by an announcer’s voice crackling.
“. . . he asked me if I could find out if Isabel liked him,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “It was awful. I cried for days. But that’s what’s so amazing about Mark, you know? He picked me. He loves me.” She smiled again, tilting her head back.
I looked at her profile. “You’re lucky,” I told her.
“Oh, you’ll find someone,” she said, patting my knee. “You’re just a baby still, anyway.”
I nodded, my eyes on the distant stadium.
“I know,” I said, and I had that feeling again, that all of this could slip away at any moment. I could have been anyone to her.
We stayed on the roof for a long time, Morgan and I. We let our feet dangle over the edge and chewed gum and listened to the game, waiting for the crack of the bat and then whistling and cheering, as the runners dashed toward home.
I worked alternate lunches and dinners at the Last Chance, perfecting my blue cheese dres
sing and mastering the Cuisinart. But I still had a lot to learn.
“Waiting tables,” Morgan said to me one day, “is a lot like life. It’s all about attitude.”
“Attitude,” I repeated, nodding.
“Yours,” she went on, gesturing at the restaurant, “and theirs. It’s an even equation.”
From behind the counter, where she was reading Vogue, Isabel made her hrrumph noise. Then she turned a page, loudly.
“Some people can do this job,” Morgan said. “And some people can’t. And it can really suck. Also, as you know by now, you have to be able to handle people being mean to you.” She tilted her head to the side, watching me. This was a test.
“I can do that,” I said solidly. It was the one thing I was sure of.
Morgan was always close behind me, keeping up a constant chatter of corrections, managing to handle her own section and double-check mine as well.
“Refill that tea at Table Seven,” she’d say over her shoulder as she passed, her hands full of dirty plates. “And Six is looking kind of antsy for a check.”
“Right,” I’d say, and do as she said. Isabel pretty much ignored me, pushing me out of the way to get to the ice machine or pick up her food.
“The important thing to remember,” Morgan always said, “is that you are a human being and worthy of respect. Sometimes, customers will make you doubt that.”
This I had already learned when a large woman with a run in her pantyhose had asked me the difference between Nachos and Deluxe Nachos.
“Let me check the menu real quick,” I said, pulling one out from under my arm. “I’m new and I don’t quite—”
“Duh,” she said loudly to her friend, rolling her eyes. Her friend, also large, giggled and smacked her gum.
“You are kidding me,” Morgan said when I told her. We were huddled back by the soda machine. She turned around and eye-balled the table, hand on her hip. “How rude can you be?”
“Obviously pretty rude,” Norman said from the other side of the food window, where he was flipping burgers.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Of course it does.” Morgan turned back around, fixing her pointy gaze right on me. “You are not stupid, Colie. Don’t let anyone make you think you are. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She took a deep breath and rattled it off: “Regular Nachos: beans, chips, cheese, chiles. Deluxe Nachos: all the above plus chicken or beef, tomato, and olives.”
“Duh,” Norman said loudly.
“Duh indeed,” Morgan replied, grabbing a tea pitcher from behind me. “Get back out there,” she said to me, nodding toward my section. “There’s work to do.”
And the pronouncements continued.
“Good attitude, good money,” Morgan always said. “Shit attitude, shit money.”
“Oh, shut up with that already,” Isabel would groan, stabbing her pen back in her hair. I don’t know what bothered her more, Morgan’s advice or that she was sharing it with me.
Despite all of this, Morgan was always the one to crack under the pressure of a busy rush. In my first two weeks, I saw her quit twice. Three times, if you counted my first day in Colby. It was always the same, beginning with some offense in the later part of the night. She’d declare herself fed up, take off her apron and toss it down indignantly, announcing that she was quitting. Then she’d slam out the door to give someone a piece of her mind. But they had always just left, so she’d come back in, grumbling, and tie her apron on again.
Isabel didn’t even flinch during these episodes. She never seemed to get ruffled or upset; she took nothing personally. It was clear that Morgan was dramatic enough for both of them.
Some days I pulled double shifts, working for Morgan so she could wait for Mark to call. She was always incredibly grateful. Sometimes I worked for Isabel so she could sleep off a hangover or go to the beach. She wasn’t. The most I’d gotten was a bland “Thanks” tossed over her shoulder as she was coming or going. When we worked together she turned the radio up loud, so we didn’t have to talk. And after we locked up she usually drove away toward town, leaving me to walk home alone in the dark.
It didn’t really bother me. I’d spent years hearing whispers, taunts called across gyms and locker rooms, and I was thankful even for those compared to the insults right to my face. I’d been called fat and easy, slut and whore, Hole in One. So I didn’t mind being ignored. For so long, it had been all I wanted.
When I worked lunches I came home in the late afternoon, while Mira was taking her nap. She had to have one every day, just like a toddler; she said she was no good otherwise. I’d take off my shoes and creep around, exploring, all the while careful to listen for the creak of her bedroom door.
Mira wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Everything was dusty and there were cobwebs hanging from the corners of the ceiling. The first week I’d taken the initiative with my own room, washing the windows and cleaning under the bed, kicking up an entire colony of dust bunnies and some lost socks. In the downstairs closet I found three vacuum cleaners, all of which were, of course, BROKEN, leaving me to do the best I could with a broom while I wondered, again, about Mira.
She rode her bike everywhere, even at night, when she attached an incredibly bright light to the handlebars, which occasionally blinded oncoming traffic. She lived off grilled chicken salad, homemade doughnuts, and junk cereal. She was constantly beginning projects: among other things, the living room contained a cane chair with a broken seat, halfway re-strung; a china pig with three legs, sitting next to a tube of Super Glue; and a toy bus with two missing wheels and a dented front fender, as if it had been in some kind of very small, violent accident.
I wasn’t even going to ask about that.
At night, while she sat in front of the TV—JIGGLE TO GET 11—Mira worked on her projects. Nothing ever seemed to get completely fixed, just tinkered with and then labeled with a note. I came back one day to find she’d taken apart the alarm clock in my room—which, although I reset it each day, had been CONSISTENTLY FIVE MINUTES BEHIND—and then put it back together. She was very proud of herself until she discovered she’d left out one huge spring. Now, instead of ringing, it made this awful moaning sound. The next day I’d snuck out to the drugstore and purchased a nice, new digital clock, which I kept hidden under my bed as if it was contraband and illegal just because it worked.
The strange thing was that she had enough money to buy all new appliances, if she wanted; I’d discovered a stack of bank statements in a lower cabinet while searching for a vegetable steamer.
The evening I found the vacuum cleaners, I came downstairs to find her sitting on the back porch watching TV.
“Mira,” I said, after shoving the broom into the closet, “why don’t any of these vacuums work?”
She hadn’t heard me, her eyes fixed on the TV. I walked down the dark hallway to stand behind her chair. Then I heard my mother’s voice.
“My name is Kiki Sparks,” she was saying, right there in her trademark windsuit, blonde hair cut and curled, hands on hips in the can-do pose. She was in a fake living room set, with a plant and sofa behind her. “And if you are overweight and have given up, I want you to listen to me. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Because I can help you.”
The music started, that same tune I knew so well; I’d seen this infomercial a million times. It was the one that had made my mother a star.
“Mira?” I said softly.
“It’s just amazing what she’s done,” she said suddenly, as we both watched my mother clap her hands and walk toward the studio audience, grabbing a woman to demonstrate how to do a deep knee squat (perfect for toning those glutes!). “You know, I never doubted your mother could get thin. Or conquer the world, for that matter.”
I smiled. “I don’t think she ever did either.”
“She was always so sure of herself.” Mira turned around in her chair to look at me, the light of the TV on her face. “Even during those terr
ible years when you two were moving from place to place, she was never scared. And she’d never take a cent from our parents; just because she was too principled. She wanted to prove to everyone that she could do it. That was always very important to her.”
I thought back to the nights we’d slept in the car; to ketchup soup. To the times she’d thought I was sleeping and cried silently, her hands over her face. My mother was strong, to be sure. But nobody was perfect.
Onscreen, my mother was leading the crowd in a touch-step, touch-step, her arms waving over her head. She had a big, bright smile, her muscles flexing and unflexing with each lunge. “Let’s go!” she said to them, to us. “I know you can do it! I know you can!”
Mira was watching, leaning in close. “I just love this program. The weight stuff—” she paused, shaking her head. “That’s not important to me; we’ve always been different that way. But I just love to see what she can do. It’s infectious, you know? That’s why I always watch,” she said softly, there in the dark, the light from the TV flickering across both of us. “I always watch.”
“Me too,” I said, and I sat on the floor by her feet. I pulled my legs in against my chest and we watched together as my mother spread the gospel, one touch-step, touch-step at a time.
chapter five
The Colby post office was a tiny little house, one room lined with mailboxes, staffed by an old man who always looked half asleep. After I worked lunches I’d leave from the back door of the restaurant, walk across an empty field, then past an auto shop and a drugstore to come out right by its front door.
There’s a kind of radar that you get, after years of being talked about and made fun of by other people. You can almost smell it when it’s about to happen, can recognize instantly the sound of a hushed voice, lowered just enough to make whatever is said okay. I had only been in Colby for a few weeks. But I had not forgotten.