The Cocktail Waitress Read Online Free Page A

you mean, too.”
    “They’re special from Mrs. Rossi.”
    “And don’t you forget. She’s a nut about it.” He tossed his cloth down on the bar, untied his apron, and came around to my side. “Let me show you the rest.”
    He showed me my pocket totalizer, my cash register, and my book of slips, and explained to me how to keep the slips in separate piles, and then when a check was called for, to tote it up on the totalizer,present it to the guest, take his money to the register, put it in and ring up the amount of the check, then take out his change and bring it back to him. “And for Christ’s sake don’t make a mistake,” he growled, looking me in the eye. “Bianca’s easy on some things, like wind blowing free in the blouse, but on others, like clean fingernails and money, she’s a bitch. You make a mistake, it’s on you.”
    “I won’t make a mistake.”
    I had just got the chairs down and was putting the Fritos out when Liz came back again, from where she’d been in the kitchen. “So let’s split up our stations now,” she said. “How you say we split it right down the middle and alternate: one week I’ll take the near station, the one by the door, while you take the one near the men’s room, next week, vice versa. Fair enough?”
    “O.K., suits me fine. But this week you take the station next to the door, so you can greet them when they come in, the patrons I mean—they’ll all be strangers to me.”
    “That’s how we’ll do it, sure,” she said. Then:
    “Got to go—here comes Mr. Four-Bits, always our first customer. You’d think, the way he rolls out his two quarters, they were solid silver, from the Philadelphia mint.”
    I looked, and Mrs. Rossi was bringing a customer in, an important-looking, middle-aged man in gabardine slacks and sport shirt. Liz motioned, and Mrs. Rossi started to seat him at her station. But when he saw me he stopped, stared, and said something. Bianca looked surprised, and brought him over to me. It was my first meeting with Earl K. White, and I was just as startled as Liz.

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    He was a tall man, rather pale, and obviously someone important. I went over, handed him a wine card, with of course the cocktail list facing, and asked: “May I get you something, sir?” He asked for a tonic on the rocks, without even opening the card, and when I turned to the bar, Jake was already opening a bottle, and putting it out beside a highball glass with one rock in it. “Hold on to your tray at all times,” he said, “and watch the cork center. It’s to keep stuff from sliding around, but if you’re not used to it, tricky.” I went back to the table, put down the glass and poured, and took the bottle back, throwing it into the box under the bar. Then I walked past Mr. Four-Bits to my place near the men’s room. But he turned and motioned me to him. “You’re new here?” he asked.
    “Yes, sir—this is my first night … If you have to know, you’re my first customer.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Mrs. Medford.”
    At last, after watching it all day, it slipped out on me, but at once I corrected it. “Joan.”
    “You gave yourself away.”
    “… I already said it’s my first night.”
    “I can’t say I’ve found many cocktail waitresses called ‘Mrs.’ It sounds more like the way a lady announces herself.”
    “I am a lady, I hope.”
    “That may be; not every waitress is.” He said it with a glance in Liz’s direction. I couldn’t imagine what he found unladylike in herdeportment or manner and not in mine, unless it was that I had called him sir. We were wearing the same outfit, after all, with the same fraction of the buttons on our blouses unbuttoned and the same lack of concealing fabric underneath.
    “The ones that I know are,” I said. “And I imagine most of them are. Being a waitress and being a lady are not incompatibles.”
    “That’s a very big word for a waitress.”
    “I’m sorry, sir, if you prefer smaller ones, let’s