Personal Yummy #14
Placing one foot after another, she makes it in, her eyes on the floor. Her short, full hair is stiffly curled and dyed a lackluster shade of brown, and a drab, gray dress with a skinny, cracked belt hangs on her stout body, sometimes covered over with an off-white, dingy shawl. A musty, old smell accompanies her also. Her lips, however, are painted a red that’s quite shocking.
“Hi, honey, how are you?” she says as her eyes, the same color as her dress, look up at me expectantly, a soft, kind, natural smile on her face. “You are going to be my waitress today, aren’t you, honey?”
We’ve become rather friendly. Ever since the first time she came in to eat, which is now a weekly occurrence, I’ve felt compassion for her. She usually arrives around two, when business is slow, and we chat for a few minutes. I slide into the seat across from her, and we talk—mainly—about me, she never wanting to give up too much information, always so insatiably curious about my dancing and my writing, and all that I hope to achieve.
When I’m not free to chat any longer, either because a new customer has come in or I am starting to feel guilty for sitting down on the job (especially today, the first day I’ve ever worked with Nick…he’s filling in for Curt), she orders a glass of Pepsi with a straw, and a grilled chicken sandwich, topped with lettuce, tomato, raw onion, and mayo. She doesn’t like any of the side dishes we offer—french fries, coleslaw, potato salad, or applesauce—so she asks if she can have a side salad with Italian dressing instead. “Okay, honey? Okay?”
“Oh, okay, Olivia…okay. No problem. Let me get that for you,” I reply—week after week, in fact—always feeling a little twinge of uneasiness, but always agreeing to it anyway.
I head to the kitchen and take out one of the already prepared salads from the cooler, unwrap it from its plastic covering, fluff its contents up a bit so it looks fresh and appetizing, pour a bit of the golden specked-with-spices Italian dressing into a small plastic container and place it on the edge of the glass plate, and then deliver the salad to my friend.
“Thanks, honey, thanks,” she says, looking down at it warmly. “That’s just fine, honey.”
She proceeds to slowly eat her salad and then the rest of her lunch when it’s ready, the entire time gazing around the restaurant and watching me work, seemingly so content to be in the presence of another, to have some activity to entertain her.
About an hour later, having briefly checked on her every now and then, I stop at her table. As usual, nothing remains on her plate or in her glass, which have been pushed to the side. “You enjoyed it, I take it?” I ask her.
“That I did, honey. That I did,” she says, grabbing her torn, overused pocketbook from beside her and placing it in front of her on the table. She then reaches inside and, with no searching at all, suddenly retrieves a sleek, beautiful, shiny, silver tube, its top adorned with the engraving of a playful sprite.
“Can’t forget this,” she says, turning the tube, allowing the glistening red to rise, applying the color to her lips without a mirror, with the skill and accuracy of a surgeon.
“Certainly not,” I say, watching her intently.
She rolls her lips inward for a smoothing final touch, placing the tube in the exact spot she found it. Then she hands me ten dollars. I reach into my left-hand apron pocket, fingering through the bills that are in there. I find her bill and walk up to the bar.
“May I get some change, please?” I ask Nick as I hand the rectangular white bill to him, with the money placed on top of it.
“Sure,” he says, taking the bill and money from me and turning toward the cash register. But instead of running the bill through the register and getting the change, as he usually does, he looks down at the bill, as if he is studying it.
What’s so interesting?
He turns back around toward me and looks up. Staring at me and not moving a muscle, he says, “Jenna, you do know that you’re not permitted to substitute a salad for the side dishes, don’t you, unless you charge two dollars extra?”
I pause for a moment, taken off guard. “Oh yeah… Yeah, Nick… Sorry about that,” I finally reply. “I do know that.”
He stares at me for a while again, apparently not exactly sure how to react. “Well…well… We’ll let it go this time,” he eventually says, turning to his register and opening it with its familiar ding! “But please don’t do it again. If we start doing it for one person, Jenna, we’ll have to do it for everyone… Okay, Jenna? Understand me, Jenna?”
“Okay, Nick,” I say, taking the change from him and walking away, but fully intending to keep doing otherwise. How else will she continue to afford her lunches and her lipstick, those rebels against her melancholy.
******
The above story is the sixth excerpt that I’m sharing from my coming-of-age novel, The Grill on Murray Avenue—set in the nineties—about the inhabitants of an unassuming bar-and-grill in Squirrel Hill, a vibrant neighborhood in the east end of Pittsburgh. The story is told by Jenna, an idealistic, ambitious waitress who is at the center of it all.
Sometimes you just have to break the rules.
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