Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [32]
“Someday,” Shannon whispered.
“Yeah,” I whispered back. We knew exactly what we meant.
I’m Working on My Charm
I’m working on my charm.
It was one of those parties where everyone pretends to know everyone else. My borrowed silk blouse kept pulling out of my skirt, so I tried to stay with my back to the buffet and ignore the bartender, who had a clear view of my problem. The woman who brushed my arm was a friend of the director of the organization where I worked; a woman who was known for her wardrobe and sudden acts of well-publicized generosity. She tossed her hair back when she saw me and laughed like an old familiar friend. “Southerners are so charming, I always say, giving their children such clever names.”
She had a wineglass in one hand and a cherry tomato in the other, and she gestured with that tomato—a wide, witty, “charmed” gesture I do not ever remember seeing in the South. “I just love yours. There was a girl at school had a name like yours, two names said as one actually. Barbara-Jean, I think, or Ruth-Anne. I can’t remember anymore, but she was the sweetest, most soft-spoken girl. I just loved her.”
She smiled again, her eyes looking over my head at someone else. She leaned in close to me. “It’s so wonderful that you can be with us, you know. Some of the people who have worked here, well . . . you know, well, we have so much to learn from you—gentility, you know, courtesy, manners, charm, all of that.”
For a moment I was dizzy, overcome with the curious sensation of floating out of the top of my head. It was as if I looked down on all the other people in that crowded room, all of them sipping their wine and half of them eating cherry tomatoes. I watched the woman beside me click her teeth against the beveled edge of her wineglass and heard the sound of my mother’s voice hissing in my left ear, Yankeeeeeees! It was all I could do not to nod.
When I was sixteen I worked counter with my mama back of a Moses Drugstore planted in the middle of a Highway 50 shopping mall. I was trying to save money to go to college, and ritually, every night, I’d pour my tips into a can on the back of my dresser. Sometimes my mama would throw in a share of hers to encourage me, but mostly hers was spent even before we got home—at the Winn Dixie at the far end of the mall or the Maryland Fried Chicken right next to it.
Mama taught me the real skills of being a waitress—how to get an order right, get the drinks there first and the food as fast as possible so it would still be hot, and to do it all with an expression of relaxed good humor. “You don’t have to smile,” she explained, “but it does help. Of course,” she had to add, “don’t go ’round like a grinning fool. Just smile like you know what you’re doing, and never look like you’re in a hurry.” I found it difficult to keep from looking like I was in a hurry, especially when I got out of breath running from steam table to counter. Worse, moving at the speed I did, I tended to sway a little and occasionally lost control of a plate.
“Never,” my mama told me, “serve food someone has seen fall to the floor. It’s not only bad manners, it’ll get us all in trouble. Take it in the back, clean it off, and return it to the steam table.” After a while I decided I could just run to the back, count to ten, and take it back out to the customer with an apology. Since I usually just dropped biscuits, cornbread, and baked potatoes—the kind of stuff that would roll on a plate—I figured brushing it off was sufficient. But once, in a real rush to an impatient customer, I watched a ten-ounce T-bone slip right off the plate, flip in the air, and smack the rubber floor mat. The customer’s mouth flew open, and I saw my mama’s eyes shoot fire. Hurriedly I picked it up by the bone and ran to the back with it. I was running water on it when Mama came in the back room.
“All right,” she snapped, “you are not to run, you are not even to walk fast. And,” she added, taking the meat out of my fingers