Nicki Leone

 

When I first went to college I worked, as many had before me and since, as a waitress in a small diner across the street from where I had my morning classes. Brimming with the indefatigable energy of youth, I had arranged to work the very early morning shift, opening up at 6:00 a.m. to a crowd in need of coffee, eggs and bacon. I would take a break after the breakfast rush, run to class across the street, come back for the lunch crowd, run back across the street to class, and depending on the day and the state of my wallet (always light), sometimes come back to help with the dinner rush before finally taking the metro home to a cheap apartment I shared with four other people to do my homework, drink, smoke pot and generally behave like a college student. The restaurant staff was me and two other waitresses, the owner, the owner’s daughter and a couple cooks, and it was these half dozen people, plus the steady stream of regulars that comprised most of my social life for the first couple years I was at school. Looking back, my memories of that time are warped and confused—all running together into one endless working shift—an indistinct swirl of images of heavy white ceramic dishes filled with the greasy remains of a thousand Greek omelets and Souvlaki specials, of  smoky rooms and half-filled ashtrays, and of heavy cups of weak coffee which I drank almost continuously while I was working. I remember a few of the regulars; the men who worked as mechanics at the tire shop next door and who were clean in the morning, grimy in the afternoons, and enamored of their Harley-Davidsons; the skinnier, paler boys who worked at the stereo shop, called themselves “audiophiles” and discussed the relative merits of ideal Bang & Olufsen speaker placement for different audio effects. I even dated a few of them. I spent a weekend on a Harley with one of the mechanics who, once we got out of town and in with his pack, insisted on being called “Gypsy,” which even at the age of twenty I thought was ridiculous. I spent much more than a weekend with one of the pale, malnourished audiophiles. The floor of his apartment was marked with masking and electric tape to show where his stereo speakers should be put for each different Dylan, Stones or Bowie album to best recreate the recording studio placement of the band. He listened with his eyes shut, and liked to quote William Burroughs to me, which should have been a sign of trouble.

But on the whole, despite these brief flings and flirtations, the waitresses and the regulars at the diner stayed on their separate sides of the counter. People came and went and ordered breakfast and paid more attention to their own small concerns than to the girls who brought them their food. And we hurried between tables taking orders with blasé, apathetic superiority, regarding each patron as but a brief visitor to our domain, making snap assumptions about them while we served their meals and then forgetting their faces even as we were clearing the filthy dishes and pocketing the meager tips. During slow periods—the owner’s daughter smoking a cigarette, me leaning against the counter clutching my lukewarm coffee—we watched the few people still eating and gossiped, not very quietly, about the ones who had just left.

I stayed working at the diner for about two years and came away with a few habitual quirks I have yet to rid myself of. I developed a real distaste for watching people eat, and for being watched while I eat, a neurosis that has stayed with me to this day. I formed a habit of over-tipping wait staff no matter how bad the service on the assumption, certainly true, that they must have had at least one real bastard of a customer that day. I ended up with a mild contempt for Harley Davidson motor bikes, but a real admiration for Bob Dylan. And I learned, in those quiet moments between shifts, how to people-watch, which aside from learning to count change was probably the most useful skill I took away from being a waitress.

I also developed a fondness—one might almost call it a kind of literary “fetish” —for stories set in restaurants and diners. I find them irresistible, to the point where they have earned almost an entire shelf on one of my book cases: Empire Falls, Last Night at the Lobster, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe, Chocolat, Miramar, Bailey’s Café, and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break.

The newest book on that shelf is a slim novella called The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre, a quiet little story about a week in the life of an aging bartender at a small, unexceptional café in the outskirts of Paris. Like the waitresses used to do at my diner, like wait staff does in any restaurant, Pierre lives his life watching. He watches patrons come and go, allowing them to float in and out of his life as he must drift in and out of theirs. His day is meted out by the small rituals of running a business, from the time he opens the doors and wipes down the tables to the final moment he locks up for the evening. He is trusted by the café owner, on casually good terms with the cook and the other waitress, relied upon by the owner’s wife.  It is an easy, undemanding existence, only occasionally punctuated by something a little more interesting, like the patron who, when he drinks too much, will take off his clothes and dive into the Seine unless he and the cook can stop him. Pierre lives his life passively (he says that he decided to divorce his wife during a melancholic moment when he went to buy a pack of cigarettes), letting whim and chance blow him where they will. He decides he will read Primo Levi’s If This is a Man at one point because he saw a customer reading it and the young man’s “eyes were shining the whole time.” But on the whole the people who come and go seem to have little impact on Pierre, and he almost none at all upon them. Whim and chance have blown him to this café, where he has landed like a dry autumn leaf caught in a corner. It is a curious state of non-existence, and one that seems to satisfy the bartender, until the day that the new waitress arrives.

The unsettling thing about the new waitress is what she implies by her mere presence. For if there is a new waitress, then what has become of the old waitress? Has she left? Will she return? Pierre watches, in some resignation, as later on in the day his boss also walks out the door and doesn’t come back. Pierre has seen the boss do this before—the man has a wandering eye and it has lately wandered in the direction of Sabrina, the missing waitress. But this disappearance feels different, perhaps because Sabrina is also gone. Perhaps because the cook, Amedee, is shaking his head and contemplating finding another job. Perhaps because the boss’s wife has yet to even come down from their upstairs flat and make her usual appearance. Suddenly, the quiet, unchanging existence of the café begins to unravel. The following day the boss still doesn’t return, and although it turns out he has not gone to her, Sabrina doesn’t come back. The wife cries. Pierre and the new waitress handle the evening dinner rush on their own. Amedee mutters that no one has placed that week’s order with the market and they will run out of food in a day.

In the end, it takes almost no effort at all for the secure little life of the café to disintegrate completely. The new waitress only lasted one busy shift. The wife goes after her missing husband, telling Pierre to put a sign on the door. The regular customers gather around the posted notice that reads “closed for a week” and the buzz lasts all of half a day before they drift to other cafes in the neighborhood. The cook salutes Pierre and disappears into the neighborhood streets, no doubt to be snatched up by the first establishment he walks into, (for he is an excellent cook). Within the space of three days, it is as if the café had never existed, never mattered. And Pierre is left to lock up for a final time, his life, always precariously unimportant, now completely irrelevant.

The Waitress Was New is a melancholy little story, but strangely not a bleak or hopeless one. Pierre’s life seems empty in the telling, but in fact his days are made up of a hundred small and vivid moments. There are only 117 pages in this story and yet his life feels real and detailed. It’s almost like a particularly good landscape painting or street scene. One of those pictures where you, the viewer, see a hundred different stories hinted at in the expressions and gestures of the people on the canvas. Pierre lives, it seems, always in the present, always glimpsing those stories. He neither regrets the past nor has ambitions for the future. Instead he shuffles through his days always alert to the life all around him. And if he doesn’t take joy in it, he at least derives some satisfaction from the small part he plays—walking an elderly neighbor to the market one day, reading Levi in the hopes of discussing it with his customer the next. His life is one of transient moments, but he tries more often than not to make those moments good. Which, in the end, is all that any of us can do.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre (Archipelago, 2008)
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (Alfred A Knopf, 2001)
Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan (Viking, 2007)
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café by Fannie Flagg (Random House, 1998)
Chocolat by Joanne Harris (Viking, 1999)
Miramar by Naguib Mahfouz (Three Continents Press, 1990)
Bailey’s Café by Gloria Naylor (Vintage Contemporaries, 1993)
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill (John F. Blair, 2000)
If This is a Man by Primo Levi (Abacus, 1958)


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.