“Waitress”
Oregon Humanities
Fall 2007
In the fall of 1969, I wore a white polyester uniform, hemmed modestly at the
knee, and a black apron. My sturdy white shoes seemed better suited for a 65-year-old
woman than a fifteen-year-old girl. My sister, Pat, two years older and identically
dressed, already knew the ropes at the Dolly Madison Ice Cream Parlor. She showed me
which busboys to avoid; how to sneak ice cream from the walk-in freezer; how to write a
“dupe”; and how to spot the “sad men” who came for dinner each night. They were past
40, slightly balding, and as beige as the trench coats they wore. More important, they
were single – a sorry state in the family dominated world of the 1960’s. We concluded
that they lived in the anonymous apartments along Route 30 outside Philadelphia, sterile
buildings without meatloaf-scented kitchens. No apron-clad wife waited for them with a
kiss and a martini. We could offer but pale substitutes, our aprons clanking with tips.
What drew my sister and me to Dolly Madison was the chance to save money for college
tuition. What kept us there was a mission - to create a sense of home in the public
sphere.
In mid-century America, the boundaries were set: women ruled the domestic,
from the Latin domesticus "belonging to the household.” Men held power in public
spheres like restaurants. But was the division ever that clear? Looking back now, I see
how waitresses infiltrated public space, cloaked by the feel and scent of the home
kitchen. Men may have gleaned bigger tips at Riley’s Steakhouse farther up Route 30.
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But in their black and white penguin dress, floating between tables like smoke, waiters
were barely present. They couldn’t banter with customers or ease their loneliness.
At sixteen, I advanced to blue polyester and a white apron a few miles up the road
at the Mari-Nay Diner. The Dolly Madison had morphed into the Lemon Meringue Pie
Shop, then went bust (but not before my family had our fill of left-over chocolate cream
and strawberry pies). At the diner, men stayed in the kitchen, while women reigned out
front. Kindly old Joe fried the fish his brother caught at the Jersey shore. Rebel, the line
cook, liked to taunt me for customers to hear. “You’re so skinny if you stood sideways
and stuck out your tongue, you’d be a zipper.”
“Don’t pay him no mind, hon,” Bea instructed, smoothing her white hair into a
net. I apprenticed myself to Bea, Pat and Marie, the older waitresses who kept steady the
flow of conversation. “How’s the missus? Did Joey make Little League?” On weekends,
Bea’s days off, I worked her station – the sacrosanct counter of aluminum edged Formica
lined by twelve shining stools with red leather seats. Each day, the regulars tested me.
Some placed their orders as they approached — “Two over easy with rye toast” —
expecting the plates at their usual spot when they sit down. And would the “new girl”
remember the extra cream with coffee? I scrambled to match the barrage of orders to
customer’s faces.
During five years at the diner, including a stint after I dropped out of college, I
discovered that regulars were not just sad men; many people came to restaurants for a
sense of home. There was Linda, who worked for a law firm, a blonde beauty who told
me stories of caring for her dying mother. There was Mr. Evans, who wore a wedding
ring but ate at the diner almost every night. When his wife made a surprise appearance
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after church one Sunday in a mink stole, the waitresses breathed a collective “aha.”
Casseroles in the kitchen didn’t jive with fur coats.
After my first year, Bea’s customers began to trust me. They revealed hardships
at home, pride in their families, and brought me birthday gifts and Christmas cards
stuffed with dollar bills. Yet one diehard for whom I remained an interloper was Smitty,
an ancient bent Irishman who ran coffees for the workmen at the Chevron station across
the street. Smitty had lost his fingers to an accident in the “old country.” I suspected he
lost more than fingers. He ranted incoherently at Bea’s counter – a self-styled diner sage
in a torn tweed jacket and plaid cap. Only proven waitresses could fill his take-out order:
Marie, a redheaded fellow Irish compatriot and Bea, who knew how to position the cups
just so between the stubs on each hand. My first year working the counter, I labored to
win a smile from Smitty. But I suspected he’d never trust a young girl with so little
experience of the world.
During a slow season at the diner, I moved to the private Merion Cricket Club,
where the Irish waitresses from Donegal lived on the grounds in rickety wooden
dormitories. Our black cotton dresses with white ruffled aprons completed the
“Upstairs/Downstairs” picture. As the years passed, I found myself dressed in a
kaleidoscope of costumes: hot pants and boots at Dummy’s Delightful Saloonery; a red
cowgirl shirt and hat at Roy Rogers; a sailor get-up at the Windjammer Lounge, and a
string of other outfits. By the time I graduated from college, I’d worked in sixteen
restaurants. I’d also devoured Simone de Beauvoir and the feminist classics. Suddenly,
inequities glared in every waitress job I found as I moved around the country. Women
sweated through breakfast and lunch, created intimacy with customers, yet carried home
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half the wages of their male counterparts at dinner. The power to domesticate, I realized,
just wasn’t enough. As I worked my way through graduate school, I demanded night
shifts to make wages equal to men’s. At thirty-three, an MA in anthropology and a PhD
in folklore in hand, I reached the pinnacle — a French restaurant in Seattle. I joined the
Big Boys, sporting black and white for dinner shift, bringing home $150.00 on a Saturday
night. No more gendered terms: we were all “wait staff.” For two years, I basked in
equality, good tips, and camaraderie with the other waiters.
One afternoon, a group of overweight tourists in Bermuda shorts stopped for an
early dinner as they awaited the Alaska ferry. The other waiters balked, smelling a lousy
tip, but in the group, I saw my former Mari-Nay Diner customers. Waiting on them, I
slid into the bantering and joking that I hadn’t realized I’d missed. Then, a sprained
ankle kept me from work for three weeks, and I knew I had to give up restaurants.
Maybe the prize of equality arrived too late; my body felt battered from nearly twenty
years as a waitress. Maybe the trade of intimacy with customers for higher wages felt
bittersweet. Finally, I found what some friends considered my first “real job” —
coordinating an arts program and teaching at a liberal arts college — work for which my
tenure in restaurants seemed scant preparation.
In 1990, I began teaching anthropology and gender studies. In both domains,
debates circled the question of power. Throughout anthropology’s history, most
fieldworkers who studied power were men; not surprisingly, they found it in the public
square and the chief’s hut – male arenas. Emphasis began to shift in the mid-twentieth
century. In Male and Female, Margaret Mead famously wrote that when men “cook or
weave, or dress dolls or hunt hummingbirds,” such work is respected. “When the same
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occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important.” Then, in the
1970’s, a book called Woman, Culture and Society rocked the anthropological boat with
questions. How do women exercise power? Is the public-private division always the
critical boundary? My class debated whether we could look to the kitchen, the sewing
circle, and the bedroom as places of power. In our discussions, I could have reached for
examples from my own fieldwork with Native Alaskan women — an exploration I’d
begun while a waitress on Kodiak Island. I might have drawn on oral histories with
Latinas in Oregon that revealed women’s considerable influence in the family.
Instead, I found myself back at the Mari-Nay Diner on a clear spring day during
my second year. Early morning light shimmers on the aluminum door as I get ready to
open the diner at 5 o’clock. Smitty arrives behind me, brandishing his cane, plaid cap
tipped to one side. Instead of his usual muttering, he whispers, “Lovely day, lass.” From
under the soiled cuff of his tweed jacket appears a small bouquet of white azaleas. I
reach for the flowers, feeling how the years have smoothed the knobby flesh of Smitty’s
stubs. We traverse the threshold of the diner together, dissolving the divisions: male and
female, public and private, customer and waitress, the brokenness of a sad man and the
still fresh hope of a young woman. I steady the coffee cups between Smitty’s stubs,
finding perfect balance. The memory brings grief as well as pleasure, for I know now
how rare such moments of wholeness are, how fragile the selves we lift beyond our
divides.
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