Career Waitress

It’s funny to think about it, but after nearly ten years of slinging drinks and bad pub food it seems apparent that I have become the thing I never expected: a career waitress. There was a haze of something like embarrassment around this for a while, particularly at the moments when people from my past would pop up to exclaim, “You’re still doing this?” But I’ve long since realized that the job has very little to do with me.

I used to lie about what I did when I traveled. It seemed reasonable to me that I was in a new country and no one was going to find out what I really did so why not completely fabricate a new alias for myself? Though most of the time I was just the borderline alcoholic divorcee in the bungalow next door. Now I don’t lie. I’m a waitress and I have a job that says very little about me. It just permits me the freedom to do what I like.  

I’m in Bratislava right now, watching the days pass slowly, as I read and write as much as I want and wander through a tiny town square watching men play chess with pawns that come up to their waists, the clock tower ringing at odd hours and my desire for a glass of wine in the afternoons seeming suddenly normal here.

I hang out of my window at night, feeling the air cool around me and listening to the weird electronic polka music that spills from the bar up the street, swinging one foot in the dark space of the air below me. I don’t have anywhere to be for a while. I don’t have a job right now. My aunt calls and asks me what my plans are and I tell her that I don’t really have any; I’ve got time. I’m used to living on not much at all, and there’s nothing hanging over my head that I need to get back to. I’m not exactly messing up a pension.  

I hate that when you meet someone new they immediately ask you what you do, as if your job somehow defines you, and maybe it does and you care a great deal about it. But for me this is not the case. My writing defines me, my relationships do, my love of reading does; there are so many more important things in my life.

It’s for this reason that I don’t like being the date at work Christmas parties and weddings, as I get caught up in a corner with someone who asks me, “So, what is it that you do?” And I know that my answer will cause their eyes to fog over, because they’ve written me off after a single two syllable word. Afterwards I’ll find myself sashaying up to the bar to get us both a drink because in their words “I’m the professional.”

I talked about this with a girlfriend a while ago and she admitted to knowing the feeling as well, watching someone slowly turn away from facing you, their shoulder suddenly directly in your line of vision as they’re inching away from you, not even decent enough to excuse themselves to go to the washroom. “You’d think we were the registered sex offender in the neighborhood,” she said to me as she mashed mint in a glass. “I’ll sometimes make things up afterward, just to see if they’re still listening, like I’ll claim to moonlight as a wet nurse occasionally.”

“What kind of responses do you get to that?”

“Are you kidding? By that point in the conversation no one’s listening to me anymore.”

Some days I come home with hair that smells like French fries and my shoes squish with beer. Some days I’ll have to tell the married guy who tried to come home with me that his wedding ring makes me want to hang myself. Some days my job makes me wish that I’d done something else. But I am so much more than the job. And best of all I know that I really have nothing to lose. That I can just let my so-called career slip off my shoulders like the snow that’s falling from the sky in the place that I’m not just dreaming of going to at night, but am heading to next.