Friday I applied for a job as a waitress at the island version of a diner.  The plan was G and I would wander down after the lunch rush, have a beer at the bar and fill out an application.

Getting ready in the morning I showered and kind of scrunched my hair.  A couple of years ago my British hairdresser was so shocked at the very idea of more significant intervention that he stopped cutting, scissors poised in the air, and said, “You don’t actually use a brush or comb do you?” 

I sometimes, guiltily, still brush my hair, but, frankly, I always regret it.  It only makes matters worse.

I put on my tightest shirt and the pedal pushers that show my ankles but not too much of the rarely touched by sun or razor parts of my legs.  I went as far as lipstick, and I thought I looked quite fetching in an over 50 sort of way, but when I saw the lissome young things already working at the diner my heart sank and I asked G why on earth they would hire us.

“Because we’re smart,” said G, “and we won’t give away free food to our friends. You’ve got waitress experience, right?”

Well, yes I have.  About three decades ago in college vacations.  The best was an old fashioned steak house in rural Florida where I worked several summers.  The owner was a widow, a tiny, painfully thin woman who always had a cigarette (on a long black holder) hanging from her lips.  Getting summoned to her quarters above the restaurant was like getting an invitation into Miss Havisham’s house.

The other waitress was Billie, a middle aged woman who hinted at many ailments, all of which she darkly ascribed to the fact that her husband wouldn’t have anything to do with her in the Right Kind of Way, which even now puzzles me.  I thought I knew what she was talking about but I didn’t think it made you sick.

There were two cooks, Rosie and Maud, large, kind, black women with many children and more grandchildren.  They worked seven days a week and all day long. In the afternoons between shifts they lay down on the cool, concrete kitchen floor to rest, and Rosie read the Bible to Maud, because Maud couldn’t read.  After awhile they fell asleep, and the sounds of their snores came through to the dining room, quiet before the evening rush. No one was getting paid.

The butchering was done by Miss Havisham’s son, who hadn’t a clue how to do it properly, and, as Billie said, kept cutting the meat leaving “big old spoon bones”.  It is true we sometimes got complaints. Miss Havisham was always unmoved.

The restaurant had what now seems to me the most extraordinary system.  We took orders, and then we went into the kitchen refrigerators and chose the raw steak for each customer ourselves.  We grabbed the meat, slapped it down on a long stainless steel table and announced how it was to be cooked.

Then, I am sorry to say, we went straight out to the restaurant again (and I don’t remember any intervening handwashing), or picked up the plates of cooked food from the serving hatch.  (“That one’s yours, Baby,” Rosie would shout to me; she always knew.)

Rosie and Maud hardly ever got the orders muddled and I did learn a lot about how to choose the best steak (and get the best tips).  Far as I know I didn’t actually poison anyone.

At closing time the customers at the bar ordered their drinks with wheels on (in a takeaway cup).  If someone local was really drunk the barmaid, who ran a tight ship, would ask me to give him a lift home on my way. 

I liked being a waitress then, and I think I would like it again now.  I can’t quite afford not to work at all (and besides I need to pay into Social Security – I’ve been gone a long time and I haven’t got my 40 quarters), but I want to spend more time writing, and thinking about writing, and that means trying to keep away from work that takes up my mental energy – at least the creative part.  Memorizing who ordered what is just fine. 

There’s good research that says even elderly rats who get problems to solve can grow new neurons (and I’m thinking I could use a few), but you are going to have to google the research yourself because I haven’t got the job yet and my neurons aren’t up to it.  Try me again later.