by Ivan Coyote
Now, a devious toast thief or lazy buspan leaver is a thing to be scorned, a thing never to pour coffee for, but a waitress who doesn’t polish silverware because she is too busy cleaning blue cheese dressing out of her hair because someone left it on the top shelf of the cooler with the lid on loose is a waitress to be rescued, in that calm, resigned yet noble way that waitresses cover for one another:
“I got the two truckers at table eight for you. They’re coffeed and watered and their toast is on.”
You do these things for one another. Especially if she’s from out of town, with a fancy name, and you’re about to turn queer that very next fall but you don’t quite know it yet, all you know is that the way the back of her neck blushes under her tan when she accidentally pours water or coffee on American tourists makes you want to calmly, nobly, polish her silverware.
She was bilingual, and didn’t have an accent when she spoke either language, but would slip French words into her softly-spoken English sentences in a way that made me not care that she stole my toast:
“Je m’excuse, ma cherie, but I took your deux brun toasts. I put more on. C’est okay, non?”
We would make fun of our customers’ American accents, and the way that wiry grey hairs grew from their noses and ears, counting their tips and smoking and laughing conspiratorially, as waitresses do, in the end booth, when things slowed down.
One morning, when an unfed New Yorker was screaming at Sylvia, she backed through the double swing doors into the kitchen, explaining in French that she actually spoke no English at all, and so the floor manager, a five-foot tall German closet case, approaches me:
“I’m sorry. It’s about your friend. She’s a sweet girl. Terrible waitress, though. One more complaint and I’m going to have to let her go. Would you talk to her for me, please?”
The way I figured it, no matter how much of her work I did for her, she only had a couple of days left to find another job.
I myself had two jobs; the other was cutting lawns for the City of Whitehorse. She asked me to see if I could get her on there, and so I did.
What she neglected to mention at the time was that she didn’t know how to drive a tractor, and that she was violently allergic to grass clippings, but I helped her out a lot, and our summer not-quite-a-romance proceeded along famously.
One morning, while greasing the nipples on her tractor and talking, we discovered, small town that it was, that my mother had fired her father just a couple of months ago.
“Ta mère et mon père,” she shrugged as I cleaned her air filter for her.
I got the details from my mother that night at supper.
“Jack Wadsworth? He’s Sylvia’s father? The man’s a lunatic. Of course we had to let him go. He’s a complete incompetent. Delusional. He didn’t even tell his wife for two months, just kept getting up and going out like he still had a job. Sad, really. Pretended he was going to work but instead he went down to the courthouse and huns: about watching: the proceedings every day. Drove the bailiffs crazy. Poor Sylvia, she seems like a nice enough girl. He used to be a lawyer, they say. Sad, really, but what can you do? He’s suing us, of course, representing himself. The man is a paranoid.”
Sylvia’s parents lived on the top floor of an old three-storey apartment building with her sister, Claudia, a mousy twenty-Seven-year-old virgin in her last year of medical school, also home for the summer, working at the hospital.
One day when no one was home, Sylvia and I were out on her balcony, which was really the corner of the roof, nude sunbathing and drinking iced lattés, which I thought at the time were a French delicacy (very cosmopolitan), reading Sassy magazine.
My hand was touching her hand, ever so casually and accidental-like, and I think maybe I wanted to touch her but I didn’t really know it yet, so luckily she interrupted my latent tendencies to read part of an article aloud to me:
“Says here that one of women’s top sexual fantasies is to make love with une autre femme. Uughh. Speak for yourself, huh?”
I immediately moved my hand away from hers to sip my French latté and changed the subject.
“So … you wanna go swimming tomorrow?”
“I can’t. I’m going white-water rafting with Greg and Jeff and all them, remember? We should put our clothes on. Mon père is going to be home from ‘work’ soon.”
We laughed like only daughters can at their father’s short-comings, and got dressed.
I heard the gory details the very next night from my best friend, Joanne.
There had been a terrible accident on the highway. Twelve teenage white-water rafters had rolled their van, Joanne’s brother’s girlfriend from Vancouver had been killed, cut in half in fact, going through the windshield. Sylvia had been trapped in between seats, Jaws of Life and the whole nine yards, and Sylvia’s sister, the twenty-seven-year-old virgin / almost doctor, was driving the van because the guys were all too drunk.
But the weird part was, Sylvia’s dad had shown up at the hospital, snatched both of his daughters from the emergency ward waiting room, and disappeared with them.
Police were looking for them for questioning. They hadn’t received medical attention, or trauma counselling. No one was answering their phone. Joanne and I speculated at length over the drama of it all, and my mom filled in the technical details: they were driving Mr Bryant’s van. Mr Bryant worked with my mom. Helped her to fire Mr Wadsworth, in fact. Mr Bryant’s daughter, the gymnastics prodigy, was in the van, and was still in hospital with a leg that might not ever work right again.
And Sylvia’s sister, the virgin / almost doctor, had just gotten her learner’s license not days before she rolled the van. She was relatively unhurt, but just sat at the edge of the highway afterwards, eyes staring straight ahead. She was unable to move, unable to help any of the other injured passengers.
My mom related these tragic circumstances with small-town fervor, and attention to nuance.
“This whole thing is a mess. That Jack Wadsworth better get it together and get those poor girls into hospital or they’ll never recover.” She tapped her temple twice with one fore-finger dramatically. “Emotionally, I mean. He is deeply dis’ turbed. It’s tragic, really.”
I wrote Sylvia a get well card and went by her apartment. No one answered the buzzer, so I tucked the little yellow envelope into the locked metal grate on their mailbox, and left.
When she didn’t show up at work the next day, my other boss came up to me.
“So where’s your little friend? She pulled a no-show on me this morning.”
I hastily explained the tragic circumstances to him.
“What, she can’t make a phone call? You tell her, she does it tomorrow, she’s outta here.”
“But her father is a lunatic,” I explained patiently, because he didn’t know the nuances.
“My father is a lunatic too,” he returned without sympathy. “I can pick up a phone and call in.”
As circumstance would have it, I mowed the lawn at the graveyard right across from her apartment building that day, and with each dusty pass on my tractor I surveyed the building for any sign of the goings-on within. Nothing all day. My little yellow get well card was still hanging forlornly out of the mailbox. As I was driving away at the end of the day my eyes shot up to the curtains: all closed. Hold on; they were all open this morning, I was sure of it, she was up there, I could feel it.
Murder-suicide? I imagined her lunatic father pacing in front of the couch, her sister sadly dead, a virgin-almost-doctor on the floor next to the china cabinet, and Sylvia, duct-taped to a chair, unable to call out the window to me as I mowed the lawn and did her share of the weed whipping.
Because people who can’t waitress very well don’t screw up a summer job with the city unless they’re dead, or duct-taped to a chair. This was my logic.
I explained the whole fiasco to my dad that night, over a scotch. He was unenthusiastic, but unknowingly the catalyst for what was about to occur.
�
�If you’re so fucking worried about her, quit sitting here complaining to me about it.” He swirled ice cubes in his glass with a lazy turn of his wrist. “Get up off your ass, and go down there and pound on her door until someone lets you in.”
He’s absolutely right, I thought as I putted downtown in my Volkswagen. Do something about it.
So I snuck in through the door behind another tenant and ran up the stairs to her apartment. I could hear subdued voices behind the door, so I knocked hopefully.
The voices stopped immediately. Silence, then the sound of shuffling. But no answer.
I pounded on the door for about ten minutes, explaining that no one wanted to press charges or anything, that no one blamed Claudia; the police just wanted to talk to them, and Sylvia, you should at least call in sick or you’re gonna get fired. Please open the door.
And then I heard footsteps behind the door. Finally, Jack, you’ve come to your senses.
But then there was a noise, just behind the door. But it wasn’t a door opening kind of noise at all, it was a small, barely audible, well-oiled click of … well, it sounded like
The fucker’s got a gun! He’s behind the door, and Jesus, that sounded just like a gun!
There are times when, faced with what seems to be a life-threatening situation, that an up-until-then-ordinary person performs a feat of extraordinary bravery and / or strength, and remarkably saves the day. They later tell the reporter that they just did what anyone would have done under the circunistances, and that they really aren’t a hero.
But this wasn’t one of those times.
I turned and ran out the fire escape and onto the roof. But there was only another well-oiled click, and the door shut behind me, leaving me locked out, three stories up.
Needless to say, Jack didn’t open this door either when I pounded, so … things were not really looking so good for the hero. Just me, the locked fire escape door, and an old ladder.
Of course I promptly propped the ladder up onto the roof above the locked fire escape door and climbed up. I mean, truly, what other options did I have?
I ran across the roof and dropped onto the balcony where I had almost accidentally touched her hand while sunbathing just days before; I ran without thinking, without one thought, it’s true. I don’t think I had one single plan in my mind at the time, but I felt so close to Spiderman that I ran right through the balcony door into the apartment of a lunatic who I thought had a gun.
I saw Sylvia, and her sister, too, still alive, for one split second before their mother pushed them both into a bedroom, and Sylvia’s tear-rimmed eyes caught mine for one more second, and then she looked down, just before the door slammed shut.
Just then Jack clumsily broadsided me and I ended up on the floor, the Spiderman knocked right out of me. Then the door clicked, and I found myself alone out on the balcony again, three stories up, but with no ladder this time. I could hear Jack screaming at his wife to call the cops.
Escape would have been a fruitless endeavour, with my Spidey-senses gone, so I just paced the balcony rails, at first worrying about being gunned down out there, helpless as a hamster. Until I realized that he probably wouldn’t shoot me, with the police already on their way.
This was followed by a short period of self-doubt and remorse. There was no one else to blame for my circumstance. I had acted without thought or foresight, driven by adrenaline and misguided loyalty, and here I was, with nothing to show for my valour but a carpet burn on my elbow. Not even a noble injury. I had no rescuees, no reconnaissance. I had no cigarettes.
The police sure took their time; good thing I wasn’t a real burglar, and good thing he hadn’t shot me, because I wouldn’t have had a chance. So instead what I had was a full-on stress-related nicotine fit, and while pacing the porch, I noticed that if I peered over the railing I could see my van parked askew on the street below, my cigarettes taunting me from the dashboard.
Finally the cops arrived, and I was ushered by a freshly shorn rookie officer through the apartment and into the hallway outside their front door. I did not see Sylvia or her sister, and apparently Jack had hidden the gun. I tried to appear humble and law-abiding, because for some reason the cop was treating me like the criminal.
“So, young lady, you want to tell me just what happened here?” He rocked back on his heels, thick cop thumbs in wide cop belt.
“I sure would. This guy is a lunatic, and he’s had his whole family locked up here for three days and –”
Jack interrupted me. “She is the lunatic, I want her charged with break and enter – she pounded on my door for twenty minutes –”
“It was only ten.”
“– and when I wouldn’t let her in she climbed onto the roof and broke in.”
“The door wasn’t even locked.”
“She is a delinquent and I want her removed.”
“He is a paranoid and the police are looking for him. He.…”
The cop silenced us both. “Well, if the police are indeed looking for him, then that is police business. We do not need you crawling around on balconies for us, do you understand me? Now I want you to go home. And don’t even think about phoning or coming by here for a couple of weeks.”
“A couple of weeks? He’ll kill them all! They need trauma counselling, or they’ll never be the same – emotionally, I mean.” I tapped my temple for emphasis.
“Who?” asked the cop.
“Sylvia and her sister.” Obviously he had not been briefed by his superiors.
The cop looked at Jack like they were both just humouring me. “Where are your daughters now, Mr … uuhh … Wadsworth?”
“They went to the movies several hours ago with their mother.”
“He’s lying!” My voice was gaining in pitch. “They’re locked in the bedroom.”
The cop rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. Your little friends are at the movies with their mother, and it is time for you to go. This is private property.”
Apparently the police and I had different priorities when it came to serving and protecting.
When I got home, my mother was not sympathetic, either.
“You should know better than to listen to your father. What were you thinking? You could have gotten hurt. I told you that man was a lunatic. Jack Wadsworth, I mean. Your father is just obnoxious.”
I never saw Sylvia again after that night. She never called in sick, quit both of her jobs, and went back to Montreal to become a psychologist. Her sister never finished her last year of medical school, and I heard that she married a helicopter logger and moved to Thunder Bay, Ontario.
So here’s the epitaph: Sylvia called me once, about five years ago. She was going back up to the Yukon for Christmas, and she wondered if I was, too. She said her mom had said that I should come by for tea one day, when her father was at “work.” Provided, of course, that I came through the front door this time.
We both laughed, but not like we used to. We talked a bit, and finally she asked the question.
“So … I gotta know, I mean, I’ve been wondering all of these years … why did you do that?”
There are certain things that cannot be explained to peopie who have to ask, and I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised that she didn’t understand just what went down that night.
After all, she never was a very good waitress.
EGGCUPS
MY MOTHER TOLD ME ONCE NEVER TO
take your eggs out of the carton and put them in the little plastic racks in the fridge door. No matter how domestic or tidy this action might seem, it is not a good idea.
“The fridge door,” she said, in that knowing voice that women reserve for passing on kitchen wisdom to one another, “is slightly warmer than the rest of the fridge, and the eggs won’t stay as cold there, being on the outside, and what with the door opening and closing, you are far more likely to get salmonella. Far more.”
I asked what seemed the obvious thing at the time. “But then why would they
keep on making fridges with little plastic egg cups in the doors then?”
My mother frowned over her glasses at me, shaking her head. “It’s not a good idea,” she repeated firmly.
I am a disciple, and she a prophet, bringing household revelations to the unenlightened, and this is a commandment:
Thou shalt not use thine egg cups. Not a good idea.
Of course, some years later, I made myself an egg cup omelette one night after a ten-hour work day, and spent the next three days in my tiny, bachelor’s bathroom, repenting.
I used to hate it when my mother was right, but I’ve matured.
MANIFESTATION
I WAS WORKING IN THE YUKON AT THE
time, dry-air dirt under my nails, long days in the land where the summer sun seldom sleeps. It was six o’clock in the company truck, there was sand in my teeth, and sweat left shiny trails through the dust on my face. We had planted hundreds of trees and watered them that day, and I felt sunburnt.
My work partner Kelly was a sweet-until-you-crossedher straight girl, due in two weeks to marry my old hockey buddy, Barry Fuller, also a landscaper. His parents lived in the industrial area of town, and my uncle used to date his older sister Gale. Such is the small-town life, and its folks.
She was driving, and I turned to say something to her, but she interrupted me: “Oh my God, look at your face,” she said, red-faced, stuck between a laugh and a sort of half-gasp, eyes wide.
I tilted the rear-view mirror toward the offending face and looked at my reflection.
Sweat had run down my forehead and into the lines around my mouth, and perhaps I had passed a topsoiled hand over my upper lip, or maybe scratched an itchy nose with a dirty thumb, but it was a magic combination, because there it was: a dirt moustache, worn perfectly into my top lip. Sweat lines and sprinkler spray had collected a perfect line of soil there, and I had been transformed.
