Twenty Grand (2 page)
Authors: Rebecca Curtis
In the kitchen, Ken asked did I want to lick his cock, which was one of the things he knew how to say, and I said, Lao Shi, which I thought meant “Asshole” but which I later learned meant “Teacher.” My other tables had finished their dinners. I was nearly done for the night. I stood in the kitchen hoping Johnny might come in, because I felt I was ready to tell him there was something going on. Ngoc and her retarded son and the cooks were playing mah-jongg on the floor. Ngoc had lit the kitchen shrineâa candle in front of a foot-high Buddha with three oranges at its base. She had a glass of something from the bar and was screeching and laughing periodically, which seemed to indicate that she was lessening her vigilance, but when she saw me standing and waiting for Johnny she said I could polish pupu platters or fold napkins if I wasn't busy, so I ducked back into the dining room.
In the dark, the lit globes on the tables looked elegant. Outside, the pilot lights of the boats were still moving slowly through the channel. At midnight, there would be fireworks you could watch from the water or the beach. This happened every Friday night; it was part of the town's effort to make itself attractive to vacationers and perhaps to itself. I was living on a nearby island with two girls, twins, whose parents had money and let them live in a house on this island that was connected to the mainland by a bridge. When these girls finished college they would decide not to be investment bankers after all but to move to Venice Beach instead to try to break into movies, and then television, and then commercials. I'm still waiting to see them in commercials. I would like for something to happen for these girls, particularly because that night I decided people should come over to the house, lots of people, and I would in fact begin inviting people at the restaurant and continue doing so all the way home, walking along the boulevard in my skirt, so that there would be something going on to bring Johnny to, and this party would end in a fire that would climb from a guest bedroom to the attic and the roof, and which would make this the last summer these girls spent on this island.
I set up my prep tray by the lesbians' table so that when their food was ready they could see their Szechuan grand worbar flame up in front of them. This woman, my former psychiatrist, or former family counselor, and her partner, or lover, were talking so intently, about something so deeply philosophical (I gathered from the few words I caught) that I felt a certain sadness. She no longer pretended to be obliged to talk to me, as if she knew it was a larger kindness to simply let me be her waitress and not someone she had once known.
The first time we met, my entire family had driven out to her home. There was a “Welcome Friends” wreath on the door and decorative wooden ducks in the hall. We sat in her living room and my father made her cry. She asked some questions, which I answered, and my father said some things that were not answers to the questions, and she told him to please refrain from interrupting others or speaking in a loud, angry tone, and he said she really knew nothing about our family, since she was not part of our family, and that she in fact had interrupted him, and that so far her ideas were crazy, and that in his family, since he was the father, he would speak when he wanted to speak and say what he wanted to say.
My mother had nodded and put a hand on his leg and said his name in the tone of voice in which someone says, Stop, but which really meant, “I am your partner in life and I love you whatever you do,” because when she spoke she told the lesbian, We need you to work with us. You are not working with us. Then the lesbian said that perhaps it was a good idea for each of my parents, my father particularly, to come individually for counseling, as there seemed to be some issues all around that might bear discussion, and then my father had some things to say about this house we were in and this lesbian counselor and what he thought of her effectiveness, her intelligence, and her persona, and then the lesbian took a time-out break.
We sat in silence and heard her blubber in the bathroom. It was the happiest time we had known. My mother's hand was on my father's knee. I might have been smirking a little, I don't know why, except that in times of great tension or truth-telling I smirk; also I was pleased to see my father's attention directed at someone else for an extended duration of time.
After that first appointment, at the lesbian's insistence, I was told to go with either my mother or my father, not both, to her office, not her home. But that only happened once, because my father made her cry again. During our second visit, he called her a Monstrous Fat Pig. I'd found a book about menopause on her office shelf and was reading it because I was pleased that my father and the lesbian had found plenty to talk about by themselves, when my father said, You must weighâ¦
He turned to me. What does she weigh?
Two-sixty, I said.
Two-sixty, he said. You weigh two-sixty and you think you can tell me what to do, how to discipline my own daughter, how to talk to my own daughter? The lesbian counselor cried pretty soon after that. There might have been more words on my father's partâ“manipulative,” maybe “controlling,” “disappointing,” and “freakish aberration of nature.” These were words that we both liked. We drove home in a happy silence, almost a camaraderie, in which he said, Beautiful day, and How is school, and How is trackâa mood which would last approximately until midnight, when I would puke in the kitchen sink and he would walk downstairs from where he had not been sleeping and tell me that I was a shitty little mess who was destroying the family, which was his family, and had I not considered taking myself away to somewhere not this house, because if I did not he surely would take himself away, and how did I imagine my brothers and my mother would feel about that?
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M
Y ORDER
was up. I got the chicken worbar into its vat and trucked the hot iron plate out and set it down on the prep tray and produced a Sterno can from my pocket. I held the match high for drama before I lit it, and when the Sterno caught the two women clapped. Then I put the can on the plate and poured the chicken from the vat onto the plate, being careful not to pour any into the can itself.
If there's anything else I can do, I said, let me know. Then I went to fold napkins. I did this at a hidden station in the corner of the dining room. I was secretly watching them. They were talking about something I'm sure they did not give a shit about, but they clearly liked each other, and not in a sex way or a passing way but with some deep and generous mutual admiration, enough that they assumed, if they saw me at all, that I was only folding napkins, or watching the bow lights of the boats jostling for dock space at the pier, and not watching them, waiting for them to be done.
Johnny came over and sat with me. I kept folding.
Hey, he said.
Hey, I said.
He took a pile and folded.
I think there's something going on, I said. I told him the people I lived with were having a party. I said Jud would be there. I said other people that he knew would be there. I said he should come. I said that I, in particular, hoped he would come.
He said he had a few other things going on. Then he said maybe he'd come. He paused. Then he said he'd come when he got off work. I got up and left the table because I didn't know what to say next.
The lesbians were looking at me the way you look at a waitress when you're too content to crook your finger at her. I went over to their table. They said they would like, if it was not too much trouble, to take their food home in a box. I tried not to think, while I packed the box, that they would be better off without the extra food, or wonder whether they would eat it that night, individually or together, or how many hours would pass before the sadness would come back.
It was after my father called my shrink a pig that I began going to see her alone and that she suggested the special pretzels. For twenty weeks this counselor woman saw me at half rate, because my parents would not pay more, and listened to me talk about school or books or people I liked or did not like and what I wished I had done at a certain time or what I wished I had not done, and handed me tissues when she finally got me to cry, and told me that I was a good person, a smart person, a person with whom she liked to talk, and I said, Thank you, thank you, at the end of each hour, and she said, Hug me, and I did, and once she gave me a book, which I was supposed to return by mail but never did, which was pink and called
Healing the Hungry Self
and had careful marginalia at important places in her handwriting, where I wrote, What a fat pig, go on a diet, fat pig, a book I read three times in the hope of being cured.
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T
HAT NIGHT THE
party would happen. In just a few hours many people would arrive on the island in many cars and carry many bottles of alcohol into the house, which would be lit up, every room, and bottles and lamps would get broken and someone would have brass knuckles and someone else would have a gun and it would get so that Johnny and I had to go outside, down to the beach, and sit on the sand and watch the sky, dizzy with light, and the water, candy-fish bright. There was an anchored dock floating about thirty feet out, and I fixed on the idea of our spending the night on our backs, not talking or touching, but silently being together, and I would open my backpack, there at the beach, the air was still enough, and take out the stash I'd borrowed off Ken and say, I like to do this sometimes, and he'd say, I don't think I want to do that, and I'd say, Don't then, and leave him a line, and he would say, Why not, and he would like it.
My ex-shrink and her lover were waiting. I brought them the super pineapple dish. I watched them spear pineapple. Ngoc was cursing in the kitchen because she was losing at mah-jongg and the cooks were taking her money again. I heard the resounding low note of a fry pan hitting a soup vat and then the thud of an industrial tea bin crashing against the tiles. The copper lights of the promenade were blinking above the water and a firework flared up prematurely and failed to ignite and the dust cloud spread out against the sky and fell across the waiting white boats.
My ex-psychiatrist came over and took my hand on her way out. I was still folding napkins.
It was so good to see you, she said.
It was good to see you too, I said. But I didn't mean it.
Their table was neat, almost pre-cleaned, as if they had foreseen the work I would have to do and wanted to help. The little umbrellas, chopstick wrappers, and soiled napkins were piled on their plates and their chopsticks and silverware were neatly crossed. The tip was good, so as to say, We like you, but not too good, so as to say, We feel bad for you; obviously you are not cured; obviously, you've failed yourself and us. She'd left a cookie at the edge of the table and I took it and ate it. Then I saw the note she'd left, in familiar blue pen, on the check, as if I were someone she knew well or someone she still wanted to help. It said, You are kindhearted, gentle, and beloved.
T
HAT SUMMER
I
LIVED
with the Serrano twins in their parents' summerhouse. I'd met the twins at college, and even though the university was large, everyone knew them and just called them “the twins.” There were other twins, like Hami and Hamid, two Iranian guys who smiled at, greeted, and bowed their heads to everyone they'd ever met as they walked across the campus, but none of them mattered. The twins were two girls, five foot eight, with long, straight brown hair that fell exactly halfway down their backs. They were athletic, high school soccer stars, with faces you'd never notice if there weren't two of them, oval and a little indignant-lookingâthey had full lips, dark brown eyes, and chins that jutted out when they talked. When I first met them, I wondered what all the fuss was about, because they seemed stupid. They got Cs in their economics classes, even though that was their major. They thought Singapore was a city in China, and once they'd spent an hour looking for Persia on a map. They weren't strikingly beautiful, and they weren't especially kind. But everything they did they did with enthusiasm: if they ate a bite of food, the food was delicious; if they kissed a boy, the kiss was long and deep; and if they went to sleep, the sleep was dreamless and divine. Their enthusiasm made me angry, because it seemed false, but then I became included in it and realized it was genuine.
After a few weeks, I'd learned to tell them apart: Jean's eyebrows were darker, thicker, and closer to her eyes, and Jessica's lips were larger and her cheeks were fat, a beautiful bedroom face, as if made as a place for a hand or another face to rest. She was three minutes younger, sweeter, quicker to anger, and quicker to forgive. Later, after our friendship ended, maybe their interests diverged, but when I knew them they took the same classes, spent all their time together, argued over their shared clothes, and, as far as politics, they were in agreement: they favored self-starters, a free economy, and zero government intervention.
Their father was a banker, and they planned to be bankers, too, and dropped financial phrases into everything they said.
The twins knew I needed money for college and had told me this town where their parents had a summerhouse was chock-full of expensive restaurants. We would all waitress at one of them, they said, and over the summer, make a killing. In high school the restaurant I'd bussed tables at served only sandwiches, so I said yes. I'd been surprised when the twins and I became friends, because in terms of the college, I didn't exist; but they thought I was funny. The first day we met, we went out to lunch. At lunch, they watched me squeeze my lemon into my water. Then they watched me open one pink fake sweetener and one blue one, pour them into the water, and stir the drink with my straw. Jessica asked to try a sip. She proclaimed it delicious. A minute later, Jean tried a sip. Her eyes went wide with delight.
It's poor man's lemonade! she said.
She squeezed her own lemon into her own water and added one blue sweetener and one pink. You're so funny! she said. I love it!
From then on, every time we went out to lunch we all drank poor man's lemonade. I had to come stay for the summer, they said, because they sometimes grew bored with each other, and they always got along better if someone else was around.
When I arrived, I was thrilled. The twins' parents' summerhouse wasn't the nicest one on the lake, but it was two stories, of white brick, and had a large back deck and a backyard that dropped down to a beach. The windows of the house let sun in all day long, the lake was deep and clear and had a sandy bottom, and in the garage was an ancient red Fiat the twins said could do 130 on the straightaways of the town.
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T
HE RESTAURANT
the twins had picked was the Christmas Inn, which was on the main route, by the waterfront. One long rectangular room in front was the dining room, and a narrow, rather trapezoidal space behind it was the bar. Both rooms had green shag rugs and a lot of green linen tablecloths. Despite the single, multitiered crystal chandelier and the marble façade in the foyer, it wasn't a prepossessing place. But it served seafood and steak, and the menu was overpriced. After filling out our applications, we met Boris, the owner and head cook, a man with a huge stomach and longish silver curls on his head. He had merry blue eyes, a bulbous mauve nose, and cracked pink lips. He was wearing a white T-shirt, tan shorts, and a bloody half-apron. His arms were thick, his posture erect, and his gut sailed before him like a flock of decapitated geese. He glanced at our applications, saw that we had no experience, and said they looked good. The restaurant, he said, could use pretty girls. Then he looked at the woman who was moving through the dining room, setting tables for dinner. She was maybe forty-five and had short black hair, olive skin, and droopy, off-kilter eyes.
Of course we have Dina, he said. We've had Dina for what, how long now, ten years?
The woman said something without turning around. Boris gave us a look. Then he called her over and told her to show us the kitchen.
Thanks for showing us everything, Jean said, when she was done.
Don't thank me, Dina said. I was doing my job.
Well, thank you anyway, Jean said.
Just what we need, Dina said. Three girls with no experience.
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W
HEN THE TWINS
and I got home we went for an evening swim in the lake and then sat in the living room, eating buttered popcorn and watching TV.
We got a job, Jean said.
Dina's skanky, Jessica said.
Waitresses are like that when they're older, Jean said. It's from waitressing too long. They get a hardened, slutty look. She turned to me. Know what I mean?
I didn't really. But I wanted to seem like I did, so I nodded and said, You mean she looks like a wench.
What's a wench? Jean said.
It's like a hardened slut, I said.
Oh, Jean said. Then yeah. That's exactly what I meant.
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W
E WORKED FOR
two weeks under Dina's tutelage. Each night, at Dina's direction, we brought Dina's tables their drinks, served her tables food, and cleared her tables' dirty dishes, then set the tables back up and handed her the tips. She would take the money, fold the bills, and put them in her apron. By the time our legs were numb, our bodies salty with sweat and our hair oiled with it, Dina would be dressed in her coatâthin, black, with a tattered fringe edge. She'd wait for us by the door. Then she'd thank us, say she was sorry it wasn't much, and give us each a few bucks.
What a wench, the twins said, on the way home, the first time it happened.
We're having our last fun summer, Jessica said. Her hair flapped over the front seat of the car, and jasmine strands struck my face. Beyond the road, enormous pines bowed toward one another and bulbous lamps glowed on granite blocks. When we're investment bankers, Jessica said, we won't ever take charity, and we'll give ten bucks to homeless men.
I would die, Jean said, if I were in my forties and a waitress. Did you see the huge veins on her legs?
It's worse if you carry trays, Jessica said. We don't carry trays. And we're just doing it for one summer. Next summer we'll have our internships.
Her veins are gross, Jean said.
I feel bad for her, I said. She has two kids.
She could have had two abortions, Jean said.
Jean! Jessica said. Don't say that!
Jean rolled her eyes. Kidding, she said.
When we got home, we drank tea and watched a few shows, as we did every night before bed. When we woke up in the morning, we drank juice-waterâwe consumed nothing but juice-water all morning, for our healthâand then we rested for hours on the white beach by the house, splashing occasionally into the lake.
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A
T FIRST
Dina earned the most money, but soon the twins were each earning double and triple what Dina or I did. Dina didn't seem to notice; however, she didn't seem to notice much. She was a better waitress than the twins, but the twins had a secret weaponâtheir sameness. Halfway through a meal, a man would reach out a fat arm, cup a shoulder in his moist hand, and say, Honey? Jean? And Jessica would say, I'm Jessica. But I can get something for you. What do you need?
The man's eyelashes would flutter, his mouth corners twitch, his lips press together and make a raspberry sound. He'd say: Are you twins?
Jessica would nod.
He'd nudge the others in the party, mostly doctors, lawyers, and dentists who'd grown little beards and come up from Massachusetts on motorcycles for the weekend. Twins, he'd say. Our waitresses are twins!
I knew it, another man would say modestly. I've been watching them.
Jessica would wait, in these moments infinitely patient, balancing empty plates in one hand, holding an empty wine-glass in the other. Then the first man, patting a tender, sun-charred face, would say, Are you identical?
By the dessert course, half the table would be able to tell Jean and Jessica apart, because they would have been served by both, and they would have pulled the tale of the twins' aspirations from them. They would have handed the twins their phone numbers, shocked that the twins also liked golf, also liked boating, and also liked to water-ski, and made the twins promise to call them, so that they could do these things together, and those in the party who'd been able to distinguishâthat one's bigger, that one's got slightly larger lipsâwould lord it over the others, saying, It's obvious, if you know where to look, and then they'd leave the twins an enormous tip.
The twins serviced all their tables together and pooled their tipsâthey called it their mutual funds, their honey pot, and the fruit of their sweat. At each night's end, when Dina was cleaning the kitchen, they'd count up loudly in the hall nearby.
It wasn't long before Dina pulled us aside. She said we needed to start getting to work on time. She'd been doing all the prep work. Also, were we stupid?
Because we'd been taking her parties' dinners and serving them to ours, whenever ours had ordered the same thing, and so her parties got their dinners late.
She's just jealous, Jessica said, in the car on the way home. Because she gets shitty tips.
I'd give her a shitty tip, too, Jean said. I'd tip her zero dollars.
I wouldn't, Jessica said. I'd never tip any waitress less than twenty percent. Because waitresses work hard.
All I know is this, Jean said: Dina has no right to yell at us.
She had a point though, I said, about us taking her dinners.
I'm sorry, Jessica said, but I don't think getting your dinner late is a big deal. Whenever I have to wait for my food, it tastes more delicious!
Dina was divorced and had two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy was sick. I didn't find out with what because I didn't ask. I just knew the boy was in the hospital, had been there a few months. One night when we were in the kitchen chopping vegetables, she dragged her wallet out. The kids were maybe eight and ten. The boy was chubby, had greasy brown hair, and was wearing a blue velour shirt. He was missing a tooth. The girl's hair was gray and her right eye was rolled toward her nose. I wanted to ask Dina why her daughter had gray hair. Instead I said they were cute. Dina got an olive glow on her face and said she thought so too. Then she put the wallet back. She might have liked them but she couldn't have hung out with them much, because some days she worked lunch then dinner and others she worked dinner and cocktailed after in the bar and lounge. When she cocktailed she wore a red bow in her hair. She'd take her last table in the dining room around eight. She'd do her side work, find the twins, and ask them if they needed anything else, and after she did the six things they wanted her to do, she'd put on lipstick, stick the red bow on, and go in the bar.
When I thought about Dina and her kids, I felt sad. But I thought about them only when I spoke to her and luckily we didn't talk much.
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I
N
J
UNE
my tuition bill arrived and I put it in my tip box. I was worried about money, mostly because I was not a good waitress. I triedâI'd chant, Redhead wants prime rib with pilaf, blondie gets rib with potato, dickwad gets teriyaki with potato, nice guy veal with pilaf, but by the time I got to the kitchen, everything was jumbled in my head. As soon as I had six parties, I was swamped. A few times I asked the twins to help. They each said I should ask the other. The twins were never flustered, because they worked together and because they had a strategy: sacrifice. Whenever they had too many tables, they picked the party they thought would tip the least and ignored them until they'd taken care of everyone else. Later they'd explain to the sacrifice how busy they'd been, and the sacrifice would forgive them. I saw the strategy's merits but lacked the resolve to do it myself, and as a result I was flustered a lot.
By the end of June, Boris said things had to change. Did I know how many complaints he'd had about me? Did I want to guess?
I don't know, I said. Three?
Keep guessing, he said.
I don't want to, I said.
Then consider this your warning, he said.
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O
NE WEEKEND
the twins' parents showed up at the house and held a barbecue for their friends. I met the twins' parents in the kitchen, where I'd come to get a snack. They hugged me, welcomed me, and told me to help myself to whatever was in the fridge. The door to the wide deck was open and I could see the friends outside, playing croquet on the lawn. I was about to thank the twins' parents, when Mrs. Serrano turned and said that while they were here, why didn't we settle up on the rent?
I must have looked confused, because Mr. and Mrs. Serrano said, more or less simultaneously: the summer's rent. Mr. Serrano named an amount. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. He seemed embarrassed for me. It's a modest rent, he said.
