At the end of each week, the women playing split the butter bowl evenly.
Mama said I wasn’t that good a waitress, but I made up for it in eagerness. Mabel said I made up for it in “tail.” “Those salesmen sure do like how you run back to that steam table,” she said with a laugh, but she didn’t say it where Mama could hear. Mama said it was how I smiled.
“You got a heartbreaker’s smile,” she told me. “You make them think of when they were young.” Behind her back, Mabel gave me her own smile, and a long slow shake of her head.
Whatever it was, by the end of the first week I’d earned four dollars more in tips than my mama. It was almost embarrassing. But then they turned over the butter bowl and divided it evenly between everyone but me. I stared and Mama explained. “Another week and you can start adding to the pot. Then you’ll get a share. For now just write down two dollars on Mr. Aubrey’s form.”
“But I made a lot more than that,” I told her.
“Honey, the tax people don’t need to know that.” Her voice was patient. “Then when you’re in the pot, just report your share. That way we all report the same amount. They expect that.”
“Yeah, they don’t know nothing about initiative,” Mabel added, rolling her hips in illustration of her point. It made her heavy bosom move dramatically, and I remembered times I’d seen her do that at the counter. It made me feel even more embarrassed and angry.
When we were alone I asked Mama if she didn’t think Mr. Aubrey knew that everyone’s reports on their tips were faked.
“He doesn’t say what he knows,” she replied, “and I don’t imagine he’s got a reason to care.”
I dropped the subject and started the next week guessing on my tips.
Salesmen and truckers were always a high guess. Women who came with a group were low, while women alone were usually a fair twenty-five cents on a light lunch—if you were polite and brought them their coffee first. It was 1966, after all, and a hamburger was sixty-five cents. Tourists were more difficult. I learned that noisy kids meant a small tip, which seemed the highest injustice. Maybe it was a kind of defensive arrogance that made the parents of those kids leave so little, as if they were saying, “Just because little Kevin gave you a headache and poured ketchup on the floor doesn’t mean I owe you anything.”
Early-morning tourists who asked first for tomato juice, lemon, and coffee were a bonus. They were almost surely leaving the Jamaica Inn just up the road, which had a terrible restaurant but served the strongest drinks in the county. If you talked softly you never got less than a dollar, and sometimes for nothing more than juice, coffee, and aspirin.
I picked it up. In three weeks I started to really catch on and started making sucker bets like the old man who ordered egg salad. Before I even carried the water glass over, I snapped out my counter rag, turned all the way around, and said, “Five.” Then as I turned to the stove and the rack of menus, I mouthed, “Dollars.”
Mama frowned while Mabel rolled her shoulders and said, “An’t we growing up fast!”
I just smiled my heartbreaker’s smile and got the man his sandwich. When he left I snapped that five-dollar bill loudly five times before I put it in my apron pocket. “My mama didn’t raise no fool,” I told the other women, who laughed and slapped my behind like they were glad to see me cutting up.
But Mama took me with her on her break. We walked up toward the Winn Dixie where she could get her cigarettes cheaper than in the drugstore.
“How’d you know?” she asked.
“ ’Cause that’s what he always leaves,” I told her.
“What do you mean, always?”
“Every Thursday evening when I close up.” I said it knowing she was going to be angry.
“He leaves you a five-dollar bill every Thursday night?” Her voice sounded strange, not angry exactly but not at all pleased either.
“Always,” I said, and I added, “And he pretty much always has egg salad.”
Mama stopped to light her last cigarette. Then she just stood there for a moment, breathing deeply around the Pall Mall, and watching me while my face got redder and redder.
“You think you can get along without it?” she asked finally.
“Why?” I asked her. “I don’t think he’s going to stop.”
“Because,” she said, dropping the cigarette and walking on, “you’re not working any more Thursday nights.”
On Sundays the counter didn’t open until after church at one o’clock. But at one sharp, we started serving those big gravy lunches and went right on till four. People would come in prepared to sit and eat big—coffee, salad, country-fried steak with potatoes and gravy, or ham with red-eye gravy and carrots and peas. You’d also get a side of hogshead biscuits and a choice of three pies for dessert.
Tips were as choice as the pies, but Sunday had its trials. Too often, some tight-browed couple would come in at two o’clock and order breakfast—fried eggs and hash browns. When you told them we didn’t serve breakfast on Sundays, they’d get angry.
“Look, girl,” they might say, “just bring me some of that ham you’re serving those people, only bring me eggs with it. You can do that,” and the contempt in their voices clearly added, “Even you.”
It would make me mad as sin. “Sir, we don’t cook on the grill on Sundays. We only have what’s on the Sunday menu. When you make up your mind, let me know.”
“Tourists,” I’d mutter to Mama.
“No, Yankees,” she’d say, and Mabel would nod.
Then she might go over with an offer of boiled eggs, that ham, and a biscuit. She’d talk nice, drawling like she never did with friends or me, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-awake person could. “Uh huh,” she’d say, and “Shore-nuf,” and offer them honey for their biscuits or tell them how red-eye gravy is made, or talk about how sorry it is that we don’t serve grits on Sunday. That couple would grin wide and start slowing their words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee. Mama never bet on the tip, just put it all into the pot, and it was usually enough to provoke a round of applause after the couple was safely out the door.
Mama said nothing about it except the first time when she told me, “Yankees eat boiled eggs for breakfast,” which may not sound like much, but had the force of a powerful insult. It was a fact that the only people we knew who ate boiled eggs in the morning were those stray tourists and people on the TV set who we therefore assumed had to be Yankees.
Yankees ate boiled eggs, laughed at grits but ate them in big helpings, and had plenty of money to leave outrageous tips but might leave nothing for no reason that I could figure out. It wasn’t the accent that marked Yankees. They talked different, but all kinds of different. There seemed to be a great many varieties of them, not just northerners, but westerners, Canadians, black people who talked oddly enough to show they were foreign, and occasionally strangers who didn’t even speak English. Some were friendly, some deliberately nasty. All of them were Yankees, strangers, unpredictable people with an enraging attitude of superiority who would say the rudest things as if they didn’t know what an insult was.
“They’re the ones the world was made for,” Harriet told me late one night. “You and me, your mama, all of us, we just hold a place in the landscape for them. Far as they’re concerned, once we’re out of sight we just disappear.”
Mabel plain hated them. Yankees didn’t even look when she rolled her soft wide hips. “Son of a bitch,” she’d say when some fish-eyed, clipped-tongue stranger would look right through her and leave her less than fifteen cents. “He must think we get fat on the honey of his smile.” Which was even funnier when you’d seen that the man hadn’t smiled at all.
“But give me an inch of edge and I can handle them,” she’d tell me. “Sweets, you just stretch that drawl. Talk like you’re from Mississippi, and they’ll eat it up. For some reason, Yankees got strange sentimental notions about Mississippi.”
“They’re strange about other things, too,” Mama would throw in. “They think they can ask you personal questions just ’cause you served them a cup of coffee.” Some salesman once asked her where she got her hose with the black thread sewed up the back and Mama hadn’t forgiven him yet.
But the thing everyone told me and told me again was that you just couldn’t trust yourself with them. Nobody bet on Yankee tips, they might leave anything. Once someone even left a New York City subway token. Mama thought it a curiosity but not the equivalent of real money. Another one ordered one cup of coffee to go and twenty packs of sugar.
“They made road liquor out of it,” Mabel said. “Just add an ounce of vodka and set it down by the engine exhaust for a month or so. It’ll cook up into a bitter poison that’ll knock you cross-eyed.”
It sounded dangerous to me, but Mabel didn’t think so. “Not that I would drink it,” she’d say, “but I wouldn’t fault a man who did.”
They stole napkins, not one or two but a boxful at a time. Before we switched to sugar packets, they’d come in, unfold two or three napkins, open them like diapers, and fill them up with sugar before they left. Then they might take the knife and spoon to go with it. Once I watched a man take out a stack of napkins I was sure he was going to walk off with. But instead he sat there for thirty minutes making notes on them, then balled them all up and threw them away when he left.
My mama was scandalized by that. “And right over there on the shelf is a notebook selling for ten cents. What’s wrong with these people?”
“They’re living in the movies,” Mabel whispered, looking back toward the counter.
“Yeah, Bette Davis movies,” I added.
“I don’t know about the movies.” Harriet put her hand on Mama’s shoulder. “But they don’t live in the real world with the rest of us.”
“No,” Mama said, “they don’t.”
I take a bite of cherry tomato and hear Mama’s voice again. No, she says.
“No,” I say. I tuck my blouse into my skirt and shift in my shoes. If I close my eyes, I can see Mabel’s brightly rouged cheekbones, Harriet’s pitted skin, and my mama’s shadowed brown eyes. When I go home tonight I’ll write her about this party and imagine how she’ll laugh about it all. The woman who was talking to me has gone off across the room to the other bar. People are giving up nibbling and going on to more serious eating. One of the men I work with every day comes over with a full plate and a wide grin.
“Boy,” he drawls around a bite of the cornbread I contributed to the buffet. “I bet you sure can cook.”
“Bet on it,” I say with my Mississippi accent. I swallow the rest of a cherry tomato and give him my heartbreaker’s smile.
Steal Away
M
y hands shake when I am hungry, and I have always been hungry. Not for food—I have always had enough biscuit fat to last me. In college I got breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my dormitory fees, but my restless hunger didn’t abate. It was having only four dollars till the end of the month and not enough coming in then. I sat at a lunch table with the girls who planned to go to the movies for the afternoon, and counting three dollars in worn bills the rest in coins over and over in my pocket. I couldn’t go see any movies.
I went, instead, downtown to steal. I became what had always been expected of me—a thief. Dangerous, but careful. Wanting everything, I tamed my anger, smiling wide and innocently. With the help of that smile I stole toilet paper from the Burger King rest room, magazines from the lower shelves at 7-Eleven, and sardines from the deli—sliding those little cans down my jeans to where I had drawn the cuffs tight with rubber bands. I lined my pockets with plastic bags for a trip to the local Winn Dixie, where I could collect smoked oysters from the gourmet section and fresh grapes from the open bins of produce. From the hobby shop in the same shopping center I pocketed metal snaps to replace the rubber bands on my pantleg cuffs and metal guitar picks I could use to pry loose and switch price tags on items too big to carry away. Anything small enough to fit a palm walked out with me, anything round to fit an armpit, anything thin enough to carry between my belly and belt. The smallest, sharpest, most expensive items rested behind my teeth, behind that smile that remained my ultimate shield.
On the day that I was turned away from registration because my scholarship check was late, I dressed myself in my Sunday best and went downtown to the Hilton Hotel. There was a Methodist Outreach Convention with meetings in all the ballrooms, and a hospitality suite. I walked from room to room filling a JCPenney shopping bag with cut-glass ashtrays showing the Hilton logo and faceted wineglasses marked only with the dregs of grape juice. I dragged the bag out to St. Pete Beach and sailed those ashtrays off the pier like Frisbees. Then I waited for sunset to toss the wineglasses high enough to see the red and purple reflections as they flipped end over end. Each piece shattered ecstatically on the tar-black rocks under the pier, throwing up glass fragments into the spray. Sight and sound, it was better than a movie.
The president of the college invited all of the scholarship students over for tea or wine. He served cheese that had to be cut from a great block with delicate little knives. I sipped wine, toothed cheese, talked politely, and used my smile. The president’s wife nodded at me and put her pink fleshy hand on my shoulder. I put my own hand on hers and gave one short squeeze. She started but didn’t back away, and I found myself giggling at her attempts to tell us all a funny story. She flushed and told us how happy she was to have us in her home. I smiled and told her how happy I was to have come, my jacket draped loosely over the wineglasses I had hooked in my belt. Walking back to the dorm, I slipped one hand into my pocket, carefully fingering two delicate little knives.
Junior year my scholarship was cut yet again, and I became nervous that working in the mailroom wouldn’t pay for all I needed. St. Vincent de Paul offered me a ransom, paying a dime apiece for plates and trays carted off from the cafeteria. Glasses were only good for three cents and hard to carry down on the bus without breaking, but sheets from the alumni guest room provided the necessary padding. My roommate complained that I made her nervous, always carrying boxes in and out. She moved out shortly after Christmas, and I chewed my nails trying to figure out how to carry her mattress down to St. Vincent de Paul. I finally decided it was hopeless, and spent the rest of the holidays reading Jean Genet and walking through the art department hallways.