Twenty Grand

T
HE STARS WERE BEGINNING
above the lake, and the boats with their tiny pilot lights were entering the bay through the channel to dock for the night. Johnny, Ngoc's son, was lighting the red evening candles with half an eye on me, because he liked to keep an eye on the help, or maybe because his mother had taught him to. I had a layer of oil on my face. My apron was shiny with duck sauce, and my pockets were puffy with crumpled dollar bills. We'd had Buffet Day earlier. On Buffet Day we got a lot of families and fat people who came because the other people who came were fat and no one was too embarrassed to load up a really tall plate, and people stayed a few hours to double-eat and left bunches of ones for tips.

I was watching Johnny glide across the dark-red carpet, menus in hand, to seat someone at the last booth in the lake-side row. Like me, he was watching the boats. I was terribly in love with him, but we were separated by race and by the fact that he hated me. Johnny was nineteen, which was my age, and we had both spent every night of the summer here—I did it because I was broke and Johnny did it because Ngoc was a widow and needed him to help her run this restaurant she'd maintained after her husband's death so that Johnny could maintain it after her own. He lit the little red candle in the booth, where he'd seated a lonely and enormous woman, and nodded at me on his way to the kitchen. I went over to the table and put down some dry noodles and a stained silver teapot and turned over a white china cup and poured some tea in it, and the woman swiveled her body toward mine and gave me the smile you give a waitress if you're the kind of person who is nice to a waitress, and I saw that the woman was my ex-psychiatrist. I knocked over the cup and the tea spilled onto the table and then onto her lap.

I'm sorry, I said, I'm sorry.

I watched her face go through a set of, “If A, then B; if B, then C; A, therefore C,” after which she said, Hi, how are you?, as if to say, Is everything OK, now? with an element of I am neither your mother nor your relative but I do care for you to the extent that my highly stretched human resources allow, and I said, Good, good, to mean Everything is good, your efforts were successful, and please feel happy about the energy you invested in me.

The next day was the start of Bike Week, a five-day festival during which a hundred thousand bikers would arrive and celebrate being bikers in our very small and very beautiful town. On the last night of that week, I would have fourteen tables and I would tell them their food was almost ready but that would be a lie, since I'd mismatched three tables' worth of orders and none of them would eat sooner than an hour after being sat, and they would each tip me nothing, to say You are worth nothing, or one dollar, to say You are worth crap; except for those people who were nicest and least likely to complain and whom I would therefore serve last. They would not eat for an hour and a half. These people would tip me a twenty and I would wonder at their foolishness and give the twenty to Ken the cook, who sold coke in the basement, and who'd been shipped in by Ngoc from China and housed in a rat-shack next door. He knew how to say “shitfucker” and “asslick” and had a habit of wiping his dick with his hands then not washing them after and telling me about it, charades style.

Ngoc knew about this but couldn't do much. She was old and strange-looking and dyed her hair black and wore rhinestone-studded mauve gowns that she thought added elegance to the general atmosphere of the restaurant. The restaurant was very red and very gold. Ngoc bussed tables and supervised the kitchen, and the bar, and us, and at night I watched her bending over the counter in front, adding columns of figures without a calculator. She couldn't control the cooks, but she kept them on because they were illegal and worked cheap. All of the cooks were wrinkled and small and had perms; once a month, they pitched in and took a cab downtown, where they bought hookers and sat for their perms.

Ken the cook cut five wide lines for a twenty in a boxed-goods room behind the meat rack in the basement, which is where Ngoc would find us, and Ngoc would be in an intolerant mood that night because the same bikers who came every year, a group of them, fat and bearded and staggering drunk, had stopped her in the lobby and chanted, Ngoc, Ngoc, Ngoc, give us a chink hug Ngoc, give us a chink hug, and Ngoc had had to totter on over in her heels and her Elvira dress and scream, So good to see you! So good to see you! and press herself against each one of their enormous bodies. When Ngoc found the cook and me doing lines in the basement she'd have some things to say to us in Cantonese and then some things to say to us in English, which would be that there is one kind of trash and there is another kind of trash and neither kind was trash that she wanted in her Eating Establishment.

But this shift was slow. I'd spent most of it putting purple tissue umbrellas in drinks and asking customers what they'd seen in town so far and telling them where they might want to go. And, even though they did not want and had not ordered dessert, I'd been bringing out ten fortune cookies on an egg-roll plate with a pile of pineapple chunks topped by whipped cream and my specialty, umbrella-lodged-in-cherry, because I remembered, when I was kid, how excited I'd been whenever we went out to eat Chinese and how, despite the fact that we took ten minutes to study the menu, we always knew exactly what we would order, which was pork fried rice, sweet n sour chicken, egg fu yung, and beef teriyaki, none of which were really Chinese, and I remembered how the waitress would bring out, for the finale, a plate heaped with cherries and pineapple chunks, and once my sister's cookie had said, “You will discover great wealth,” and then in the parking lot she found a dime and for years after that I waited for my cookies to come true.

The cherries and umbrellas came from Jud the bartender and Jud did not like my taking them, but he let me because he was short and missing two teeth and wanted to fuck me. He had a boat and a house on the promenade and was one of those people who sat on their widow's walk on bright days and watched the tourists, evaluating their stupidity or level of ugliness. I'm going boating this week, he'd say. Want to go boating? Next week, I'd say, and he'd say, Remind me. He looked a little like James Dean, some people had told him, and this is what kept him happy, I think.

 

I
N THE KITCHEN
I found towels to clean up the tea. My ex-psychiatrist was my ex-counselor, really, ex–family counselor, one in a long line of psychiatrists that at first my family, and then just I, had consulted. She was a fat ugly lesbian. Her partner, or maybe just her lover, had arrived while I was fetching the towels. I say “lover” because they seemed to be on a date. They were nervous with happiness and had elected to sit next to each other, on the same side of the booth, facing one of the restaurant's decorative highlights, a red and gold dragon gleefully humping a column. I figured this side-by-side seating arrangement to be an announcement of love, a fuck-you to the world, and I was embarrassed for them, and for myself, to be serving my ex-psychiatrist, here, in this shitty place, and for her to be eating here, in this shitty place, because she weighed two hundred and sixty pounds and there was nothing on our menu that it was a good idea for her to eat. She'd never told me what she weighed but I knew anyway because I was an excellent evaluator of bodily weight; this ability was, in part, why three years ago I had driven weekly to her horrible office.

I was standing with my waitress notepad at my chest. The boats were sliding into their places at the docks. Johnny was looking on from the lobby, to make sure I did not spill any more tea, and I thought about pleading stomachache so I could leave early and not have to serve dinner to my ex-shrink, but that would have sounded as if I had my period, which would have been gross, and Johnny liked me little enough already.

My ex-psychiatrist said, This is my friend Angela. Then we had a round of inquiry and solicitation, which was not strictly necessary since we would probably not see each other again. This woman had sat across from me for six months and had told me repeatedly that I was not a bad person, was in fact a good person, and because I do not like to talk and managed to get her to talk instead, she told me that people had been unkind to her all her life and that she had suffered great sadness and once tried to end it all with some cooking oil and a match, but ended up instead with a fist-sized patch of blackness on her skull and soft white skin grafts on her calves, and that she was now dealing with an eating disorder herself, which was obesity, and that she found that Harry's Diet Pretzels were a wonderful help and made you feel full and at peace, as if you did not need anything else, and she gave me an extra bag that she happened to have in her purse because the sadness could come upon you at any time, and it was best to have Harry's Diet Pretzels with you when it did.

I took their orders. I recommended lo mein. I said, Everyone likes it. I did not say, Everyone likes it because it is noodles in oil and you will like it too. They ordered lo mein and Szechuan grand worbar, a fancy chicken thing that sizzles over a blue flame on an iron plate in front of the customer, which I normally liked to serve because it guaranteed a good tip. I did not want a good tip. I wanted a shitty tip. I wanted a shitty tip so I could have a reason for hating the fat ugly lesbian, a reason other than that she had once seen me cry.

The lover was polite in a cold, challenging way. I said Ngoc's special tea was shipped straight from Shanghai and that our cook was famous in Hong Kong, and she nodded as if something unpleasant had just been confirmed. I guessed how their pre-soup conversation would go:

Former patient?

Yes.

Bad one?

Yes.

Think she's better now?

Probably not. I hope so. She means well.

 

I
DELIVERED
a pineapple plate to a family of seven who had ordered cheap and were excited to see it. Johnny was waiting for me in the kitchen, leaning against the industrial tea bins.

You know those women?

I had a tray full of chicken bones and half-eaten egg fu yung from the happy family. I set my tray on the wash counter and removed the plates and started slopping them off and immediately got some of the slop on my shirt.

You know them? he repeated.

Nope.

What'd they order? Lo mein?

Yup.

He took the tray from me and stashed it with the other trays.

Last party. You're off for the night.

Great. I kept slopping.

You going out?

I racked my dishes and wiped myself.

I don't know.

You got some gravy on your shirt.

I wiped myself again.

Let me know if there's anything going on.

Sure, I said. There was not anything going on, but I wondered what constituted Going On and how I could spin a night of nothing going on into Something Going On, and if he would like that, and if he did like that, if he'd like me. But I knew that he did not like me. He was a color in the sea of white that was this state, and he seldom spoke and had no friends, although he worked out all the time and was beautiful. When he mowed the littered and weedy lawn that sloped from the restaurant down to the lake, the other waitresses and I found reasons to walk by the open windows every ten minutes or so. Once, at the end of a day when Ngoc had been ill and Johnny had spent twelve hours ferrying unsatisfied customers in and out of the enormous red dining room, I found him sitting in the waitress station in front of a pile of pink drink umbrellas he'd ruined by pushing them open too forcefully. He'd said, I hate this, meaning this place, and I could tell he hated us, the staff, just as Ngoc hated us, and I guessed Ngoc would import a wife for him as she had for his retarded brother, who was twenty-nine and watched cartoons in the lobby and told knock-knock jokes and did not know how to fuck his wife and actually liked us.

I went downstairs to the basement. It was vast and unlit and I liked it, because down there I was just a person in the basement of a Chinese restaurant. I made my way around the meat racks, which were the size of twin beds and held whole bloody sides of beef. Between dark isles of boxed goods there were gallon cans of sweet and sour and plastic bags of dry noodles, and one aisle was full of weird figurines—Buddhas and dull golden phoenixes. Ken the cook was sitting there, in the dark, on a cardboard box, hands limp in his lap.

Hi, honey, he said. When he smiled, his mouth was a black pit with white spots. I pulled the chain of the lightbulb.

Shitfuck! he screamed.

I pulled the chain again. I didn't really need light.

Hey, he said.

What, I said.

He pointed at the box where he'd set up the lines. You every ten minute. Kill yourself. Stupid. Then he started talking again, but this time he wasn't talking to me and I didn't understand what he was saying anyway. I went ahead, but took less than my share, to prove I wasn't stupid.

 

I
BROUGHT
my ex-psychiatrist and her lover their soup. It was egg drop, the soup most likely to have a roach at the bottom. All the soups were left in uncovered vats on a table in the kitchen overnight, but egg drop is thick and yellow and made primarily of yolk, so that the roaches remain undetected at the bottom of the cup until the bulk of the soup has been eaten. I should add that this wasn't Ngoc's fault. Once a month Ngoc made us move all the cups and plates into the dining room, and the exterminators would arrive with their hoses and spray and then we'd put the stuff back, but it never made a difference. You could pick up a platter or a pile of napkins or a cookie and there'd be a roach underneath.

When their soup came back, the cups looked O.K.: no roaches. My ex-psychiatrist and her lover were happy. They were holding hands. Apparently, my ex-psychiatrist was right-handed and her lover was left-handed and they could hold hands and eat at the same time. When I brought their dinner plates, my ex-psychiatrist asked me, Was I at school and did I like it, meaning, was I better? I would take a year off school that fall and move in with an ex-attorney who was dealing some to finance his business-school tuition, and my one year off would stretch into five; but I did not know that yet and I said, Yes, I was at school, and I like it.