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

will rot faster if you leave these seeds in there?”
    “I guess,” I said.
    “You guess? I don’t think you understand this and I want to know why not, because if you don’t understand, you’re going to put another melon in the fridge with the seeds in and it’s going to go bad and I’m going to be very upset about that because it’s just a waste of good fruit.”
    For my father, the luncheonette was not an opportunity to have some summer fun and he wanted to make sure that I knew it was work . He wouldn’t tolerate sloppiness of any kind and what ever we prepared had to go out looking as good as possible, can taloupes included. My father also hated idle hands. It had taken us two weeks to scour the previous tenant’s dirt from the interior of the luncheonette and shine it up the way my father wanted before we served that first cup of Sanka. After we opened for business, I spent hours polishing the counter and the soda fountain.
    We all came home bone weary every night. Our dinner rushes on Friday and Saturday nights were exercises in endurance. My sister wasn’t quite as adept at dealing with the long hours and constant running as my father and I. In fact, we could set our watches by her tearful interludes on Saturday nights. She’d start looking weepy, commence sniffing, and finally hit the wall and burst into tears and we’d know it was 11 P . M . I didn’t mind the late hours, and the running produced an endorphin rush that would later become singularly addictive. It was the tough cus tomers, the ones who sent back my father’s meals and made my sister cry, who bothered the hell out out of me. Late at night, in the privacy of my room, I complained to my journal. It was too hard, I wrote, and I hated being bitched at and treated like an idiot.
    I took complaints very personally, as if they were barbs directed specifically at me and my family. I couldn’t understand why basic civilities seemed to be all but abandoned when people sat down to eat. Between my father’s glowering looks when things weren’t going smoothly and the lack of respect on the part of our customers, I began to think the summer was going to become more like an extended punishment than the adventure I had hoped for.
    There was, however, a single factor that, by the middle of July, changed my entire attitude and made working at the lun cheonette not only bearable but irresistible. That factor was Steve, the boldest and best looking of Maxman’s eligible boys. I first noticed him when he walked by the luncheonette’s windows, tossing his long hair and a handful of quarters in the air. He sat in a corner booth with a group of other boys, playing cards, plotting strategies to obtain beer, and shooting sidelong glances my way. At first, I was too shy to talk to him and merely smiled when he insisted his hamburgers be very well done and his french fries be “burnt.” When he leaned over the counter and took my hand in his one afternoon, my heart began a crazy flutter.
    Of all the strapping youths looking for a summer romance at Maxman’s, Steve was the one who persisted the longest and most insistently in seeking my attention. He sat at the counter at the luncheonette every day, drinking Coke, eating his burnt fries, and cracking wise, until I agreed to take a swim with him on my break. He was a self-proclaimed “bad boy” from Long Island who dazzled me with tales of selling joints on the subway for pocket change. His reputation was only enhanced by Lori Zucker, who informed me, once Steve and I had become an item, “I don’t know how far you go with boys, but let me tell you, if it’s not very far you can forget about Steve.” He had a dimpled chin and wore thick braided gold chains and shirts open to his waist. Like everyone else in the summer of 1978, his hair was feathered and he spent at least a half hour drying and styling it.
    “You’re so cute, it’s unreal,” he told me and I was hooked.
    We made out in the indoor