Swimming Sweet Arrow by Maureen Gibbon Read Free Book Online

dad. Lorraine had dark auburn hair that she wore in a French roll—the most glamorous hairdo I could think of when I was a little kid, and one that I still thought looked glamorous on Lorraine. She favored black-and-white uniforms, and she explained everything to me in her gravelly voice. If I became a good waitress, it was because of her.
    “You never bang a plate down, honey. You set it down nice on the table. And the customer is always right. If heordered peas and you bring peas to the table, and then he tells you he ordered corn, you just say, ‘Oh my, I’m sorry,’ and you take the peas back and you bring him corn.”
    When I told June the example of how I was supposed to admit to mistakes even if I didn’t make them, June said, “You mean you don’t say, ‘Eat your peas, asshole?’ ”
    “No, you’re supposed to say, ‘Eat your goddamn peas.’ ”
    Of course we were high, so we laughed for half an hour about that. Yet for as stupid as I acted with June about all the Dreisbach’s knowledge I was getting, I did want to be a good waitress, and I took my job seriously. I made plenty of mistakes in the beginning. Sometimes I forgot to bring silverware to a table, or I added wrong on the guest check. If I took too long getting someone’s meal out to them, Earl, the cook, stood in the kitchen doorway and hollered, “Food’s ready!” He bitched at me every night in Pennsylvania Dutch, and I was glad I couldn’t understand him. I felt like I was working in a maze those first two weeks, but then I got a handle on the job. I learned to make all my actions as useful as possible, and I ended up liking the way the job forced me to think all the time. Once I knew, I knew, and even Earl had to stop bitching so much.
    After I got accustomed to the job, though, I had time to notice more, and I became aware of how people treated me. I didn’t mind the men who teased me or the women who gossiped with me—at least I was a person to them—but other customers treated me like I was some sort of lower life form. Even when they weren’t outright rude, I could feel something ugly in their comments. I thought it might be allin my head, but one night I knew it wasn’t. A man stood up and went to leave a dollar tip on the table for his and his wife’s meal. He dropped the dollar on the floor, and when he went to pick it up, the woman said, “She’ll pick it up. She’ll take her money wherever she can get it.”
    What she said was true—I would take my money where I could get it—but I didn’t know how that made me different from anyone else. I went to the ladies room and checked the mirror to see if I looked any different, but all I saw was my face. I worked in a cheap, rough place, so that was how some people saw me.
    Neil Roy came in every day after he got off shift to sit at my tables. He worked in the Ringer mine in Trego, and sometimes he came in for dinner still covered with coal dust. Wherever he sat, he left that fine dirt, and I had to wipe down both the table and chair after him.
    After I served him dinner for a few days, Roy asked, “Why don’t you come home with me and watch me sleep?”
    He had chicken gravy and chocolate milkshake in his beard, and the stink of working all day was still on him. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being near him, and I didn’t think what he said was funny. Roy wasn’t good looking or nice, but he had big arms and a big chest from the work he did, and I guess he thought his muscles made up for his stink and his dirt. The following night, after I took his order, I got myself ready for the watch-me-sleep line, but it didn’t come.
    “How much for skin and how much for head?” he said instead.
    I walked away. I thought he was a pig and wanted to tell him to his face, but he scared me. I believed I knew what kind of man he was. My dad had friends like that—men who were rough and didn’t even know it, who used words like cunt and bitch when they talked about any