Worst Job/deadpan style

 

 

Worst Job (deadpan style)

    Linni Kennedy

 

           

            My first sight of Ocean View Restaurant was pleasant:  a pretty white building on the boardwalk, window boxes crammed with red and white geraniums, set against the blue Atlantic Ocean.

            The first sight inside is the Greek owner, a thin, older woman in stylish clothes, a large nose studded with a wart near the left nostril. She sits casually, arms and legs crossed, watching you as you enter in your best college clothes, applying for a summer job as a waitress, to be near your boyfriend who is 20 miles away in Princeton on a summer internship at Bell Labs. There will be a horrible coincidence. You and this woman here, the one with the wart and the nose, share a last name. An unusual name, a Greek name, one which I have always hated because it’s unpronounceable, unspellable and I associate it with the old Greek ladies, dressed in black in perpetual mourning for their husbands, who visit my grandmother on Wednesdays for coffee and anise bread and cry and talk in Greek  about their dead husbands and the old country.  All of this dead opposite of what someone trying to feel like an all American girl wants in her background.  But this name blares it loud and clear.             

            She looks at me sideways, over the plane of her nose and says, “We are here to make money, not to give pretty little college coeds a nice summer at the beach.” “Do you think you can understand that?”  I nod.  What mattered to me was being near my boyfriend and out of my family home and at the ocean, not whether the gnome and her family made money. But up until then I’d usually succeeded at what I’d tried. Well, except for the time I tried to learn to drive a stick shift. Whenever I tried to change gears, the people in the car bounced around like meatballs.

            Suddenly she stood up. “Follow me,” she ordered. We walk into the empty dining room, which has white tablecloths, dishes with the Greek key design, what else, sparkling glasses and silverware, and the ocean on three sides, since the restaurant actually juts out over the sea on stilts.

            “Tony, Tony,” she calls, and two men come running into the dining room. Both are dark, sport bushy brown eyebrows, mustaches, white t-shirts, white pants, and white aprons tied at their waists.  “Yes, Mrs. Arvanites,” one says and the other one says, “Yeah, Ma.” 

            “These are the two Tonys,” she explains.,  “Tony 1—he’s a my son, and the other is Tony 2, my husband’s cousin.  Anything you need to know, they tell you, OK?”

            “Yes, OK, thanks.”

            “Now we go into a the kitchen, I introduce you to Angelo and show you how the kitchen works.”  The two Tonys trot behind us.

            Angelo is short, but wears a tall chef’s hat.  He is sharpening knives and muttering some Greek music.

            “Hey, Angelo, this is one of our new summer waitresses.”  Angelo stops sharpening and singing and looks at me suspiciously. “What you name.”

            “Carolyn.”

            “What?”

            “You have to shout. Angelo’s deaf.”

            “CAROLYN.”

            “Oh, Caroleena.”  He says it like my grandfather, rolling the r and dragging out the “eena.” 

          “What you last name?”

            “Arvanites.”

            “What? You have to shout. I no hear so good.”

            I take a breath and shout it out.  “ARVANITES.”

            “Arvaneetis did you say?”

            “Er, yes. Arvanites.”

            “Just like Mrs. Arvaneetis?”

            I nod, try not to grimace, and hope he can interpret head movements.

            “Try not to do anything to  annoy Angelo, ok?” Mrs. Arvanites says. Because if he gets upset the whole kitchen gets in an uproar.  Do you know what I’m telling you?”

            I thought of my volatile Greek father and how I set off his black moods, not even knowing what I had done.  I wonder if I’ll manage to set off Angelo like I did my own volatile Greek father. “Jesus Christ, you’re enough to make a saint swear,” was my surname at home.

            “So now I tell you about the kitchen and how it works and I will tell you this one time and you will remember it, OK?”

            “OK.”  I wonder where my boyfriend is now.

           “Everyone travels around the kitchen in the same direction.  You must never forget this.  The aisles are narrow here, at dinnertime it gets hot, noisy, steaming, Angelo gets anxious, and so we streamline everything here.

            Besides, your job will be to get the customers in and out in 45 minutes or less from appetizers to dessert.  Especially if it’s a married couple, you can probably get them out in 40 minutes, because after all those years, they got nothing to say to each other anyway. Isn’t that right Tony?”

            “That’s right, Mrs. Arvanites.”

            “You’re right, Ma.”

            She jabs her long finger at the row of separate sections along the stainless steel counter.

            ‘OK, you get the order.  And then you come and shout it out to Angelo.  And make sure he hears you.  And he don’t like any special requests, so don’t give him any.  If they ask for something not on the menu, smile and nod and then give them what Angelo hands you, OK?

            How special was a special request?  Substitute a steak instead of a pork chop? Mashed instead of fries.  I wanted to ask but she had moved and was pointing to a bin of small glasses. “This is where you pick you the essentials.  We start with the appetizers.  Small juices for juice here, chilled cups for shrimp cocktail, dishes for the cocktail sauce; don’t forget the cocktail forks, and the lemon wedges.  Got it?  Here are soup bowls and bread plates and soup spoons and don’t forget the crackers.  They get three packages, no more no less. Here is the salad area, the chilled plates, the chilled salad forks.  Never mix the salad forks up with the dinner forks.” She stares at me,  until I nod.

            It seems straightforward in theory;  everything is right there.  What could go wrong?  It will be like putting together a puzzle. Fun almost.  I smile as I admire the way everything is organized and arranged and I imagine how successful I will be.

            Her rasping voice continued,” The aisles will be very crowded at night and people will be shouting orders. It’s hot, you have to keep your head on straight. Remember, under no circumstance should you go backwards, if you forget something.  Because it screws up everything and costs us money.  Do you understand?”

            I nod.

            We got to get people in and out.  Turn over those tables, remember and if you can turn over a two or four some in 45 minutes, you’ll get good tips too.  But if you can’t, then we give you the tables for 12.  They are all the old biddies  who can’t decide  what they want, always want something special, and will get mad when they don’t get it.  They don’t really expect good service, and they take forever to eat, and don’t leave much in the way of tips.”

 

            Let’s just say I spent my summer in the company of large tables filled with older folks who didn’t get out much and wanted to be pampered by their waitress and when they weren’t, left tips in the nickel and dime category.

            They did try me out on a foursome once, but a busboy managed to push my elbow just as I was serving a side dish of spinach., which slid out of the dish, straight into the bosom of a well dressed woman.  I never heard the end of the drying cleaning costs they had to pay out.

            Every time I passed Mrs. A that summer, when she didn’t ignore me, she shouted out, “Hey, Arvanites.  Do you know how much money you cost us in dry cleaning?

            And for good measure, you can be sure that I spent most of my time in the kitchen trying to wiggle my way upstream for a forgotten cocktail fork, napkin, or lemon wedge.  And I was the only, absolutely the only, miscreant in the whole kitchen.  Everyone knew who the idiot in the kitchen was.