Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  Two days later the phone rang and it was a woman asking if I was the girl who’d applied for a waitress position at the Sandy Hook Inn, it turned out I’d neglected to include my name (!), so I told her yes I was and she asked if I could start work at seven o’clock the next morning and I told her, trying not to stammer I was so excited, “Yes! Thanks! I’ll be there.”

  2

  MY SUSPICIONS weren’t unfounded: apparently there hadn’t been anyone hired when I’d been interviewed.

  Maxine, the woman who’d called me, who was a cousin of the owner-manager and his “associate” in the inn, laughed and shook her head fondly when I told her what Mr. Yardboro had said about the position being filled, saying, “Oh that’d just be one of Lee’s games, you have to take him with a grain of salt. He teases a lot but he don’t mean harm.” I smiled to show I was a good sport. Still, I was puzzled. I said, “Maybe Mr. Yardboro had hoped to hire someone better-qualified than me? Better-looking?” Maxine laughed saying, “Hey, no. Lee isn’t partial to pretty-pretty girls, believe me. We mostly hire them in the summers—college girls. But off-season is a different clientele and sometimes the diner can be a rough place and a pretty-pretty girl won’t work out. Too sensitive, and not strong enough to carry heavy trays, and doesn’t want to get her hands dirty. Can’t take the pressure, frankly.” Maxine spoke warmly, vehemently. We smiled at each other. We were both homely females. Maxine was on the far side of forty, I was twenty-one.

  3

  IN THE DINING ROOM I wore a powder blue nylon waitress’s uniform with SANDY HOOK INN and an anchor stitched above my left breast, and in the diner I could wear my own clothes, Maxine told me. Even jeans were OK as long as they weren’t obviously dirty.

  Maxine said, without a trace of irony, “The main thing for a waitress is to be efficient, and of course to smile. You’ll find that one without the other isn’t enough.”

  I’d been a waitress once before, part-time while I was taking business courses at a community college in my hometown. I hadn’t told Mr. Yardboro details of my brief experience in a restaurant adjoining a Grey-hound bus station, where plates fell through my clumsy fingers to shatter on the floor and more than once I’d spilled scalding coffee on the counter, and on a customer. At the time, at the age of nineteen, I was taking diet pills, the kind you can buy in any drugstore without a prescription, and the effect of the pills was weirdly visual—I saw shimmering halos around lights and auras around people’s heads that so captivated me, my reflexes would come almost to a halt. At the same time, the rest of the world swerved past at a heightened speed. The diet pills failed to suppress my appetite but made me ravenous in a frantic way. In secret I devoured leftovers from customers’ plates. After twelve days I was fired. The last dishes I’d dropped had possibly not been by accident.

  My job waitressing at the Sandy Hook Inn was not what I’d anticipated. I’d had a vision of working in an airy, spacious dining room overlooking the ocean but the dining room of the Sandy Hook Inn overlooked a marina of small, dispirited-looking boats with names like “Ship Ahoy!” and “Mad Max II.” After Labor Day, the dining room was open only on weekends, and on Sundays open only for brunch. My hours were mainly Sundays, when being a waitress was reduced to minimal services—mainly hauling enormous trays of dirty plates and garbage back to the kitchen. I smiled doggedly at entire families, even babies in high chairs. It soon became clear that I was the least popular of the several dining room waitresses, for my tips were the lowest. This made me try harder, smile harder. My smile was wide and fixed like something clamped onto my face and I scared myself seeing the wet gleam of my teeth in the aluminum surface of the swinging kitchen door.

  Mr. Yardboro eyed me with what appeared to be grim amusement. In a sport coat that fitted him tightly around the shoulders, worn without a tie, he overlooked the Sunday buffet and was alert to customers’ requests and complaints. All the waitresses were fearful of him; his remarks to us were made in fierce barking asides masked by a clenched smile. On my second Sunday, when I was frantically serving three large family tables, Mr. Yardboro followed me into the kitchen and pinched the flesh of my upper arm, saying, “Slow down, babe. You’re panting like a horse.” I laughed nervously, as if Mr. Yardboro had meant to be funny. His teeth were bared in a grin and the clusters of broken capillaries in his cheeks gave him the look of a cheery, friendly guy, but I knew better.

  AT FIRST, the imprint of Mr. Yardboro’s fingers in my fleshy upper arm was a dull pink, then it darkened into an ordinary yellow-purplish bruise.

  It was a fact that Mr. Yardboro was the first man to touch me in a very long time but this was not a fact that required interpretation.

  4

  I WASN’T BORN UGLY. I’ve seen snapshots of myself as a baby, as a toddler, as a beautiful little girl with springy dark curls, shining dark eyes, a happy smile. (Possibly if the snapshots were in sharper focus you’d see imperfections.) There aren’t many of these snapshots and there’s a mysterious absence of others in them, now and then adult arms positioning me or lifting me, an adult in trousers seen stooping from behind (my father?), a woman’s lap (my mother?). When I lived at home I’d stare at these old wrinkled snapshots in the family album—they were like riddles in a foreign language. I had to resist the impulse to tear them into shreds.

  In Sandy Hook, it came to me. One night in my rented room I woke in a sticky sweat and the thought came fully formed like the little ticker-tape fortune in a Chinese fortune cookie—That little girl was your sister, and she died. When you were born, they gave you her name.

  As good a solution as any.

  5

  “HEY, WAITRESS, over here!”

  “Where you been, taking a leak? More coffee.”

  After two weeks, I was waitressing only in the diner. There, the atmosphere was breezy and casual. There were a number of regular customers, men, friends of Lee Yardboro’s who whistled to get the attention of waitresses, often called out their orders from where they sat. These were men who ate quickly and with appetite, lowering their heads to their plates, talking and laughing with their mouths full. Such customers were not hard to please if you did as they asked, and their needs were simple, predictable; they ate and drank the same things repeatedly. They would not notice if their waitress was smiling or if the smile was forced, pained, faked, or ironic; after the first few days, they scarcely glanced at my face. My body engaged their interest, though—my heavy swinging breasts, my sturdy muscular thighs and buttocks. I weighed one hundred forty-six pounds, at five feet six. During a hot spell in September I wore loose-fitting tank tops with no bra beneath. I wore Sandy Hook Pier Day-Glo blue T-shirts and a short denim skirt with metallic studs that glittered like rhinestones. My single pair of jeans, bleached white and thin from numerous launderings, showed the bulging curve of my ass, and the crevice of its crack, vivid as a cartoon drawing. (I knew, I’d studied the effect in a mirror.) My bare legs were fleshy, covered in fine brown hairs; I wore sandals and, as a joke, painted the nails of my stubby toes eye-catching shades of green, blue, frosty-silver. Often, at rush hours, I was out of breath, my mouth moist and slack, my long snarly hair damp and clotted as seaweed at the nape of my neck. Hauling trays bearing eggs, sausage, thick hamburgers oozing blood, french fries and fried fish filets and clattering bottles of beer, I was a conversation piece, an impersonal object over which men could exchange sly grins, roll their eyes, sniff provocatively in the area of my crotch and murmur innuendos as I set plates before them—“Mmmm, baby, this looks good.” I learned to obey, like a good-natured dog, ear-splitting whistles, even to laugh at my own haste. If in the diner I sweated and panted like a horse, no one minded. My employer Lee Yardboro, who was happiest in the diner, mornings, drinking coffee and smoking with his buddies, seemed not to mind. Or, maybe, since it was the diner and not the dining room, he didn’t notice. He laughed a lot, smiled without baring his teeth. Called me “babe,” “sweetheart,” “honey” without sneering. Rarely did he scold me
, in the diner. Rarely did he pinch me, though sometimes, for playful emphasis, he’d poke his forefinger into the soft flesh of my waist. I despised him even as I yearned to please him. I took a curious pride in the fact that, in Sandy Hook, population 7,303, where once he’d been a star high school athlete, Lee Yardboro was well known and liked by both men and women. Though he was married and the father of several nearly grown children, there was something boyish and wounded in his bulldog face as if, an American kid, he’d woken to discover himself trapped in a middle-aged man’s body, burdened with a middle-aged man’s responsibilities. (Maxine confided in me that her cousin Lee and his wife had a family tragedy—an artistic child who’d caused them much sorrow. I stared at Maxine looking so blank that she repeated her words and still I stared and at last I realized she must have said “autistic” and not “artistic” but by that time the confusion struck me as funny, so I laughed. Maxine was shocked. “Better not let Lee hear you. There’s nothing funny about mental defects.” This time, the term “mental defects,” in Maxine’s grimly censorious mouth, set me off. Laughed and laughed until tears ran down my cheeks.)

  From above, serving Lee Yardboro as he sat in a booth with friends, I observed, with a pang of absurd tenderness, his flushed, scaly scalp through his thinning hair that he wet-combed with care across his head. I observed his rough, mottled skin, the always slightly bloodshot pale blue eyes that bulged with mirth, mock credulity, or contempt. Don’t touch me you bastard. Please touch me.

  6

  BECAUSE THE Sandy Hook Diner was a place where I couldn’t fail.

  Because, if I failed, and was fired, as I’d been fired from other jobs, what difference would it make?

  I smiled, sucking this small unassailable fact like a loose tooth.

  7

  THE WEATHER TURNED. I wore rust-red corduroy trousers with a fly front, so tight across my buttocks (I seemed to be gaining weight, must’ve been nibbling the remains of sausage, Danish pastry, french fries off my customers’ plates) the seams were beginning to part, showing a flirty minuscule trace of white nylon panties beneath. Still I wore the eye-hurting blue Sandy Hook Pier T-shirts and over them unbuttoned shirts, sweaters. Often I wore, with jeans, a pebbly-green sweatshirt I’d bought at the community college bookstore with POETRY POWER on the front in stark white letters. Seeing me, my hair in a ponytail, my waitress-smile distending my lower face, you’d think, A girl who has overcome her shyness. Good for her!

  I’d come to notice a frequent if not regular customer in the Sandy Hook Diner. He’d signal for a waitress by raising his hand and actually lowering his head, his eyes swerving downward in a kind of embarrassment, or shame. He had physical mannerisms—tics. Moving his head repeatedly as if his neck was stiff. Moving his shoulders. Clenching and unclenching his fists. I’d catch him frowning, staring at me. Looking quickly away when I turned in his direction. As if he recognized me? In fact he reminded me of a math teacher at our junior high (my hometown was an hour’s drive inland from Sandy Hook, in central New Jersey) who’d quit or been fired when I was in seventh grade; but this man, who hardly looked thirty, was too young to have been Mr. Cantry, I thought. That had been nine years ago.

  This customer, who always wore a tweed suit and a buttoned-up white shirt and no tie, came into the diner a few times a week, mostly for breakfast. He walked with a slight limp. He was a big man, well above six feet tall, with a boyish-fattish pale face and an oblong head like an exotic squash, and heavy-lidded, hooded eyes that settled on me, or upon my body, with a look of frowning disapproval. Ugly girl. How can you show yourself in public.

  He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn’t matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

  This character seemed always to be seated in my section of the diner. He preferred the farthest corner booth. There, he’d read a book, or give that impression. A shadow seemed always to be passing over his face as I approached with my pert waitress smile and sauntering hips, order pad and pencil in hand. There would be no small talk here. No crude-sexy banter. No laughs. Even before he ate his meals (fastidiously, but there was no disguising the fact that, with that big gut, he was a glutton) he looked as if he was having exquisite gas pains. His big body was as soft as something decomposing and his suits looked as if they’d belonged to his dead father. I felt a physical repugnance for him but I had to admit he was always cordial, courteous. Called me “waitress”—“miss”—and spoke slowly giving his order, watching anxiously as I wrote it down as if I might be dim-witted, not to be trusted; then he’d have me read it back. His voice was hollow and fading like a voice on a distant radio station.

  One of the weird things about the man in the tweed suit was his hair, which he wore clipped short, in a crew cut. It was a flat metallic color, a no-color, like his eyes. It exaggerated his boyish appearance but made you wonder if there was some clinical reason for such short hair, like a scalp-skin ailment, or head lice.

  In the off-season in the Sandy Hook Diner customers rarely tipped beyond ten percent of their bill. Some sons of bitches, under cover of not having change, or being mentally incapable of calculating ten percent, left even less. A handful of nickels. Pennies. The man in the tweed suit sometimes left as much as twenty percent of his bill, though frowning, not meeting my eye, hurrying out of the diner. I’d call brightly after him, “Thank you, sir!” as much to embarrass him as to express gratitude, for in truth I didn’t feel gratitude; I was more contemptuous of customers who tipped me well than of those who didn’t. Next time he came in, he wouldn’t look at me directly—as if I’d never been his waitress, he’d never been here before.

  Because he hadn’t any name and was always alone and looked so weird, the man in the tweed suit drew the ridicule of Mr. Yardboro and his friends, and my coworkers in the diner, even Maxine if she was around. Their name for him was “Lover Boy”—“Fag Boy.” The word “fag,” on anyone’s lips, aroused particular hilarity. You’d have thought that Lee Yardboro, owner of the Sandy Hook Diner, might feel protective of any customer, and grateful, but that wasn’t the case. The impulse to mock, to ridicule, to share contempt for another was too strong. (There were other customers they joked about, too, but with more tolerance. I was fascinated, wondering what they said about me behind my back.) When Mr. Yardboro cracked one of his jokes in my hearing I laughed in a way I’d cultivated in high school, overhearing guys’ dirty remarks, that was laughing-not-laughing; making hissing-giggling sounds as if I was trying not to laugh, I was “shocked,” eyes screwed up and shut tight and shoulders and breasts shaking in a feminine, helpless way. Mr. Yardboro glanced around, grinning. Like any bully he needed an audience.

  The man in the tweed suit stepped outside the diner and two minutes later everyone forgot him. Except I’d watch him walk away, as if his legs hurt him, carrying all that weight. He came on foot, didn’t have a car. Must have lived close by. One evening I saw him in the local library, frowning over reference books, taking fussy notes. One day I saw him walking on the pier, wearing an old-fashioned trench coat with a flared skirt over his tweed suit and a visored cap pulled tight onto his odd-shaped head so the wind couldn’t tear it off; he was staring at his feet, oblivious of the choppy, glittering ocean, the waves crashing and throwing up spray only a few yards from him. I wondered what he was thinking that was so much more important than where he was. I envied him, sunk so deep in himself. As if he mattered!

  If he glanced around, saw me, recognized me—I sure wasn’t going to recognize him.

  I NEVER FOLLOWED the man in the tweed suit, I only observed. From a distance. Unseen. When I wasn’t working I had a lot of time to kill. My rented room (in a converted Victorian “single-family” residence) depressed me, so I avoided it. Even as I had to admit (I’d boasted to my family) it was a bargain, at off-season rates, and only five minutes from the ocean. There was a telephone for my use even if I had no one I wanted to call, and no one to call me. There was a double bed with a mattress soft as mar
shmallow in which, every night, for as long as ten hours if I could manage to stay asleep that long, I was sunk in a deep fantastic near-dreamless sleep like a corpse at the bottom of the ocean.

  8

  WHAT DID I look like, aged twenty-one? I wasn’t sure.

  Just as fat people learn not to view themselves full-length in mirrors, so ugly people learn to avoid seeing what it’s pointless to see. I wasn’t what you’d call fat, and took a perverse satisfaction in contemplating my dumpy, mock-voluptuous female body in my ridiculous clothes, but I’d stopped looking at my face years before. When, for practical purposes, I couldn’t avoid looking, I’d stand close to a mirror, sidelong, to examine parts, sections. An eye, a mouth. A minuscule portion of nose. I didn’t wear makeup and didn’t pluck my eyebrows (I’d plucked my eyebrows more or less out in high school, furious at the way they grew together over the bridge of my nose, wrongly confident that they’d grow back) and there was no problem about scrubbing my face with a washcloth, brushing my teeth stooping low over the sink as I did once a day, before going to bed. My hair was no problem, I didn’t need to look into a mirror to brush it, if I bothered to brush it; I could snip off ends myself with scissors without consulting a mirror when it grew too long, snarly. Sometimes I wore a head rag for an Indian-funky look.