The Waitress...

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
It’s been so long since I’ve done any creative writing, and I was just itching to create a character in under a thousand words. Here they are…both of them.

She’s a pretty blonde in a vague way, with a compact body, small-built, a sweet, round face with tastefully chosen light-colored eye shadow and a light shade of pink lipstick. So many girls who waitress look the same – pretty blondes who aren’t gorgeous, and who don’t stand out in a crowd, but the customers think they’re cute, and not just the male customers. They have nice bodies in their form-fitting white blouses and tight black pants, but you can tell they’ll get fat as soon as they’ve had their second kid. This girl looked just like that.

She’s smart – she wants to go to Berkeley Law School when she’s finished with college – I heard her on the phone while she was getting a cigarette in. She attends a local college, and just got back from the beach where she had money to spend on a condo, groceries, and parties with older guys who are now doctors and lawyers. Dumped her boyfriend while she was at the beach – he had to stay home and work, and he accused her of being unfaithful while she was there. She couldn’t take the jealousy. He came to the restaurant and cried, so now everyone at work knows, and he went to her house and told her mom that the female friend she went to the beach with was a bad influence. Now she is on the phone to a guy she hasn’t seen in months, actively trying to make a lunch date between classes this week, because she needs a new boyfriend – she’s the type who can’t be without one. First, she tells him about getting promoted from hostess to server, and how much extra money this means for her, and then she says she hasn’t seen him in ages, and then informs him that she has just broken up with her boyfriend.

She talks about her job. She is making so much money now - $100 in tips for working a Friday lunch, $180 for working a Saturday lunch – she is the type that always gets hired for the well-paid jobs in the cliquey restaurants. She makes $3.25 an hour in wages, but it all just goes to taxes. She makes $450 a week just working weekends and one weekday, and she doesn’t even get the dinner shifts yet.

Just got back from the beach, but she is going to Pennsylvania next month, heading to New York with a girlfriend in October, and going back out to California in November. Waitressing pays for all of it – she certainly doesn’t have to pay her school tuition with her hard-earned money. And she’s on the five year plan, so there will be fewer classes to take each semester, with a more flexible schedule for waitressing. Once she gets the evening shifts, she’ll make more money each week than I make as a nurse.

It takes some work. The guy on the other end of the line keeps making excuses for why he can’t fit her into his class schedule. Then there is her class and work schedule to maneuver around. But by the end of the conversation she has got a tentative breakfast date on campus, and in another week or so, if all goes well, she’ll be able to say she has a new boyfriend.

She’s good at manipulating, but she’s still a team-player who is good with the customers – you can tell. These girls are all alike. Aggressive, ambitious, and hard-working – they get hired in the right restaurant by the time they’re 19 and they’ll be making $50,000 a year mostly under the table by the time they’re 21. They’ve got plenty of friends, plus a steady stream of boyfriends while they look for “The One”, a search that takes years. Most of them end up in law school; some of them get MBA’s.

I was never like her - neither as confident, superficial, or articulate. For me, love actually meant something special, and I couldn’t get it easily if I lost it – there was no way I could go from boyfriend to boyfriend at the drop of a hat. I was a waitress, too, but I couldn’t get hired at the cliquey restaurants because I didn’t have the right look.

Yet watching her, I felt amused instead of threatened. She’s cute, I thought, and fun to eavesdrop on. I am so much older than she is now that I no longer have to compete with her and her clones in any category that matters. So I guess I have reached my angle of repose, from which I can recline and watch the aggressive, smart-talkers who are destined to become so much more successful than I ever will be.