Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Read Online Free Page A

inflections of a Scorsese character, demanded, “Gimme a bagel and coffee. Cream cheese.” Ricky was four years old. Ricky’s mother, Baby, sometimes accompanied her son. She chain-smoked and drank Tab. My father was anxious to please her because, he confided, they’d gone to the same high school. “She was a hitter,” my father said.
    By far the scariest character, however, was Sophie Zucker, grandmother of the sexually precocious Lori. The mountainous Mrs. Zucker ate in the luncheonette almost every day, but she really hit her stride on the weekends.
    Saturday nights were our busiest. We worked until three o’clock Sunday morning. The owners of Maxman’s booked fourth-rate Catskill comedians who showed up and gave incredi bly weak sets. On Saturday nights, the last set ended well after midnight. We served food throughout the night, and after the show ended on a Saturday night, the luncheonette would fill up with a ravenous crowd who ate their way into the wee hours.
    Since we were serving dinner while the shows were going on, we got to see the acts only in bits and pieces. One popular joke involved the comedian holding out his hand, fingers splayed. “Pick a finger,” he told an audience member. “Wait,” he continued, shaking his hand vigorously, “let me mix ’em up.” The locals roared with laughter and ate our hamburgers, roast pork on garlic bread (a favorite among Jewish patrons interested in flaunting the laws of kashruth), chickens baked from my mother’s memories, and submarine sandwiches. We served mostly in plastic baskets, but sometimes, on Saturday nights, we used real china.
    Sophie Zucker was usually first in line for the roast pork on garlic bread, and every time she ate it, without fail, she called me over. I always approached her table with a sense of dread.
    “Duhlink,” she said in heavily accented English, “ask your fuhdder to put a little more meat on the samvich. Please, duhlink, look at dis.” She held the sandwich open. It always seemed as if there was more than enough meat on the sandwich and on the towering Mrs. Zucker to feed a small country of starving children. Yet, somehow, there was never enough meat for Mrs. Zucker.
    The first time this happened, I’d carried the sandwich back to my father in the kitchen, where he was sweating over Mr. Grub man’s platters, and told him that the sandwich didn’t meet Mrs. Zucker’s needs.
    “Bullshit,” my father replied, “there’s half a pig on that bread.” He rearranged the sandwich with slightly more pork and sent it back out.
    “No, no, duhlink,” Mrs. Zucker said, raising her voice. She went off on a minitirade about how people should get their money’s worth, how she wasn’t going to pay for such a measly sandwich, how she wasn’t going to be taken advantage of. The whole thing became very personal. “You should tell your fuhd der,” she shouted. “Tell him!”
    Mrs. Zucker terrified me and I had no doubt she could snap me in half like a twig had she wanted to. I had more trepidation, however, about facing my father with the sandwich again. But my father knew where his garlic bread was buttered. Mrs. Zucker got more meat on her sandwich that night. But every Sat urday night until Labor Day, no matter what the sandwich, Mrs. Zucker demanded still more meat.
    Serving in the luncheonette was much harder than I’d imag ined. Pleasing my father was even more difficult. Although I would hesitate to call him a taskmaster, he was a perfectionist. And of course, he was much more exacting with his daughters than he would have been with a nonrelative. There was his atti tude toward cantaloupes, for example. When he discovered that I’d wrapped a halved cantaloupe and stored it without removing the seeds, he gave me a fifteen-minute lecture on why the seeds should be removed as opposed to simply instructing me to take them out.
    “Doesn’t it make sense to take them out?” he asked. “Can’t you see that this melon