Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [35]
It would make me mad as sin. “Sir, we don’t cook on the grill on Sundays. We only have what’s on the Sunday menu. When you make up your mind, let me know.”
“Tourists,” I’d mutter to Mama.
“No, Yankees,” she’d say, and Mabel would nod.
Then she might go over with an offer of boiled eggs, that ham, and a biscuit. She’d talk nice, drawling like she never did with friends or me, while she moved slower than you’d think a wide-awake person could. “Uh huh,” she’d say, and “Shore-nuf,” and offer them honey for their biscuits or tell them how red-eye gravy is made, or talk about how sorry it is that we don’t serve grits on Sunday. That couple would grin wide and start slowing their words down, while the regulars would choke on their coffee. Mama never bet on the tip, just put it all into the pot, and it was usually enough to provoke a round of applause after the couple was safely out the door.
Mama said nothing about it except the first time when she told me, “Yankees eat boiled eggs for breakfast,” which may not sound like much, but had the force of a powerful insult. It was a fact that the only people we knew who ate boiled eggs in the morning were those stray tourists and people on the TV set who we therefore assumed had to be Yankees.
Yankees ate boiled eggs, laughed at grits but ate them in big helpings, and had plenty of money to leave outrageous tips but might leave nothing for no reason that I could figure out. It wasn’t the accent that marked Yankees. They talked different, but all kinds of different. There seemed to be a great many varieties of them, not just northerners, but westerners, Canadians, black people who talked oddly enough to show they were foreign, and occasionally strangers who didn’t even speak English. Some were friendly, some deliberately nasty. All of them were Yankees, strangers, unpredictable people with an enraging attitude of superiority who would say the rudest things as if they didn’t know what an insult was.
“They’re the ones the world was made for,” Harriet told me late one night. “You and me, your mama, all of us, we just hold a place in the landscape for them. Far as they’re concerned, once we’re out of sight we just disappear.”
Mabel plain hated them. Yankees didn’t even look when she rolled her soft wide hips. “Son of a bitch,” she’d say when some fish-eyed, clipped-tongue stranger would look right through her and leave her less than fifteen cents. “He must think we get fat on the honey of his smile.” Which was even funnier when you’d seen that the man hadn’t smiled at all.
“But give me an inch of edge and I can handle them,” she’d tell me. “Sweets, you just stretch that drawl. Talk like you’re from Mississippi, and they’ll eat it up. For some reason, Yankees got strange sentimental notions about Mississippi.”
“They’re strange about other things, too,” Mama would throw in. “They think they can ask you personal questions just ’cause you served them a cup of coffee.” Some salesman once asked her where she got her hose with the black thread sewed up the back and Mama hadn’t forgiven him yet.
But the thing everyone told me and told me again was that you just couldn’t trust yourself with them. Nobody bet on Yankee tips, they might leave anything. Once someone even left a New York City subway token. Mama thought it a curiosity but not the equivalent of real money. Another one ordered one cup of coffee to go and twenty packs of sugar.
“They made road liquor out of it,” Mabel said. “Just add an ounce of vodka and set it down by the engine exhaust for a month or so. It’ll cook up into a bitter poison that’ll knock you cross-eyed.”
It sounded dangerous to me, but Mabel didn’t think so. “Not that I would drink it,” she’d say, “but I wouldn’t fault a man who did.”
They stole napkins, not one or two but a boxful at a time. Before we switched to sugar packets, they’d come in, unfold two or three napkins, open