The Cocktail Waitress

7

Mr. White came in at five on the dot, and Mrs. Rossi, or Bianca, as she now told me to call her, brought him directly to my station, giving him the same table as he’d had the day before. He ordered tonic as before, and of course Jake had the bottle open and was pouring by the time I got to the bar. I took it to the table, served it, disposed of the bottle, and took my place by the men’s room, all in just a few seconds. But he beckoned me over, telling me: “If you tried, you could be more sociable, Joan.”

“I come when called,” I answered.

But we both laughed, and knew we’d been playing games. “I thought about you,” he remarked. “All during the night.”

“And perhaps I thought about you.”

“How long have you been widowed, Joan?”

“… Four days.”

“Four-what did you say?”

“Days-since late Saturday night. Sunday morning, really.”

He stared, and I thought I’d better tell him a bit more, at least enough to avoid making a mystery out of it, which I saw no need to do. I went on: “I’m the Joan Medford you probably read about in the papers, who put her husband out of the house, and then was told next day he’d driven off in a borrowed car and crashed it on a culvert — or culvert headwall, I guess it was.”

“Why-yes, I did read about it. I’m sorry.” And then, as he seemed to remember more: “The police figured in the item I read about it- facing them isn’t so good.”

“You could say that, Mr. White.”

And then, since I’d got that far, I went on: “We’d had an argument before I put him out, and I knew nothing about the car, the one a friend had lent him before going off for the weekend, that he drove off in. He was in pajamas, so he had no driver’s license on him, or anything to identify him. So the police, after checking out the car plates, assumed he was Leland Brooks, the owner. But then, when Leland was finally found, at Annapolis where he was spending the weekend, and he came in to the undertaker shop where Ron was, and made identification, it was Sunday afternoon. Then they got me down there, and for two hours I had to face them, answering all sorts of questions. Did I know about the car? Why did I let him drive away? Didn’t I know he’d been drinking?” I shook my head. “Did I know. He announced it at top volume when he walked through the front door and wouldn’t stop announcing it until I brought him a beer, even after it woke our son and started him bawling. And then he was ready to take a belt to him, not just for this crying but for breaking a jar the week before, which he’d done by accident, and anyway it wasn’t a special jar, we just used it to store change, back when we had enough change to be worth storing.”

“… And you told all this to the police?”

“All of it, three or four times over. It was a young private and a sergeant, and I could see they weren’t bad people, but they had a bad job to do, and they did it.”

“You have my sympathy, Joan. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

“Oh, I can-and you could too if you’d ever been hungry, ever had to stretch a dollar to feed three people. The worst was that I couldn’t possibly bury him, and had to ask help of his family. And on top of that was my little boy, and what to do about him. My sister-in-law took him, and to have any chance of getting him back I had to find work, at once. My coming here was accident-the police suggested this place, and from the bottom of my heart I thank them. It may seem queer to you, but to me it’s been a godsend. I don’t even mind these clothes.”

“You shouldn’t. They’re very becoming.”

“At least they fit.”

“And rather well.”

We both laughed again, but then he sat shaking his head, his face becoming quite solemn. “Bereavement’s a terrible thing,” he said, in a low, faraway voice, as though meaning it double extra. “It’s not so bad in itself-a black shadow at the time, but it lifts, give it time, and becomes a memory. But always it has its after effects, which can be very ugly. Joan, my wife died five, almost six years ago, a blow I still haven’t recovered from. But the worst of it wasn’t her, losing her I mean, it was the effect her passing had on her children, my stepchildren, to transform them from a seemingly loving son and daughters into three vultures, who think nothing but money, money, money. Morning, noon, and night, they and the lawyers they have do nothing but hound me ragged, for their shares of their mother’s estate. Joan, my wife left a will, leaving a fourth to me, and a fourth to each of them, but we had everything together and to divide it would mean the liquidation of my business, my property, my holdings of various kinds-it would take a year to do it and would leave me completely disorganized, so I’d have to start in business all over again-I’m simply not going to do it. They can wait till I die.” And then, in a very dark and mysterious way: “Joan, there are things about me that you don’t know, that perhaps you’ll never find out. But I have to suspect, that the badgering these three have given me could well be the reason I’m in the condition I face for the rest of my life.”

He was making me somewhat uncomfortable, talking that way of his stepchildren, and perhaps to change the subject I heard myself say: “Oh you don’t have to tell me. Because the bereavement, the hours with police, even asking for help with the funeral were nothing to what came later.” I then told about Ethel and her schemes to steal Tad from me, ending with how she’d acted that very afternoon. “I suppose I can understand it,” I said. “My child is a joy to be with, and he is her flesh and blood, and all she has left of her brother. Just the same, allowing for everything, I’m sick at the idea she wants him, wants to steal him off me, I mean-and still don’t know what to do. Just for now, I have to let her keep him, as without money I can’t get him back and couldn’t keep him myself if I did. Not without savings to fall back on, and with a mortgage hanging over me for good measure, which is how my loving husband left me. But-be thankful for little things. For the time being I have a job, and believe it or not, it pays. Not many treat me as you do, or did yesterday, I mean-but I’m not doing too badly. Compared with other things, other kinds of work, I mean, even allowing for this outfit I have to wear, I’m better off than I thought I was going to be.”

I may have said more, especially about Ethel, all the time wishing I hadn’t, as I wished he hadn’t said what he did about his stepchildren and what rats they were-one of the first things I had learned at home was: Don’t wash family linen in public, or with anyone except family. And I wish I could say I got to talking that way because of the way I felt, the way Ethel was bugging me, but it wouldn’t be true. I did it because I knew without being told, from the way he was lining it out, it was the kind of talk that he liked. So, from the beginning, I knew there was something about him I didn’t accept. But I also knew, would have been dumb not to know, that he was falling for me-that he was interested in more than just talk, and that I was playing for very big stakes. And for a stake like that you close your eyes to things-or at least a woman does. I was playing up to him, with whatever kind of talk it took. So when he paid his check with another $20, and waved the change at me, I said: “You don’t have to do that. I’m doing all right, Mr. White. And I’d like to feel you’re my friend-”

“I am your friend, Joan. I hope.”

“Then friends don’t tip each other-”

“If they’re really friends, and one has more than the other, he tries to equalize-just a little bit. But don’t worry, if it’s so very little, that can be fixed.”

We both laughed and I took the money.

That was Wednesday, and he came Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, each time leaving me $19.15. So, also on Thursday, I could put more money in the bank, and mail out my other two checks, the ones to the gas company and the electric company. And, still on Thursday, Liz came with her kit and glued the sofa leg on, putting a clamp on to hold it, so it would set firmly and hold. Friday she came and took the clamp off. Saturday, the men came from the gas company and electric company, to unlock my meters again. So Saturday, all of a sudden, from being a poor thing on Tuesday, with no job and no idea where to get one, I had a job, money in the bank, a living room that was decent again, gas, light, and phone-and had to do something about it. I mean, I wasn’t a thing, I was living. I took a cab to Woodies, the big store at Prince George’s Plaza, and bought Tad a tricycle, a blue one, more than I could afford but I wanted him to have the best in the store. And on Sunday I took a cab over to Ethel’s and came in with a smile on my face.

Not that she acted so friendly toward me. She protested against the tricycle, seeming to resent that anyone but her might buy Tad toys while he was under her roof, and really being objectionable when I took out my checkbook to pay her, a week’s board for Tad already boarded out and another week in advance, plus extra toward a new prescription for his pain pills. At first she refused to take it, but Jack Lucas, her husband, got in it, wanting to know: “When did we get so rich we don’t need fifty bucks? Take it and thank her, Ethel, and stop acting silly with her.”

So, she took it.

They lived in Silver Spring, perhaps six miles from me, in a house up on a terrace, and when I got there Tad was out back, with two other children, splashing in a backyard wading pool, a rubber thing with red stripes, that they’d filled with a garden hose. But of course the tricycle was news, and they all rolled it out front, where they took turns riding in it. Then Ethel, Jack, and I sat in the backyard, on recliners, and Ethel tried to be agreeable, unsuccessfully-and I tried, successfully. I felt positively angelic, even to her. Once, there were screams from the street, and I raced around the house to see what was going on. The little girl, who was a bit older than the two little boys, had ridden the tricycle off, so she was down at the corner with it, while the boys were screaming their heads off to her. Ethel, who followed me out, denounced the girl as a pest, explaining that she was always muscling in on what the other children had. But I knelt down, took her in my arms, and asked if she’d like a pair of skates. When her face lit up I promised to send her one. I promised the little boy a ball and glove, and Tad a new hat. Then everyone was happy, and I was the fairy godmother.

So, when we resumed our seats out back, I felt happy and pleased with myself. However, that didn’t last long.

Ethel asked, her voice like ice: “Where did you get the money you’re spreading around so generously to every child in sight? Working at your cocktail lounge?”

“That’s right.”

“I didn’t realize a waitress gets tipped so well, just for waitressing. Or are you doing more now, on the side?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“My customers have been generous with me, and I choose to share it. I won’t apologize for it.”

“It’s not the generosity you should apologize for, but what you have to do to make it possible.”

Her husband had a trapped looked on his face, as though he wished he could have been somewhere else, not watching his wife light into me.

Suddenly Tad was there, sidling up to Ethel. “What is it, darling?” she asked him.

He pulled her head down, and whispered.

She patted him, picked him up, and carried him into the house.

“You got to go, you got to go,” said Jack.

He rode me home after that, very sociably, and I felt grateful to him. But for some reason my day wasn’t nice anymore. Not because of what Ethel had said to me-she’d said as much before, and I could overlook it. But all because my son had gone to his aunt when he had to go to the bathroom, instead of me, his mother.